[flangola7]

You're confused. Where there is an ad impression (a user clicking to go to a webpage from a Google search result), that webpage pays Google for bringing them traffic. If the user never clicks the ad because Google directly presented the info natively, Google doesn't make any money.

I can only make the guess that Google offers this to remain competitive against Bing; it both reduces their income and increases their tech stack.

[dmak]

It seems you are the one confused. If you present any ads on your website (Google or not) then you have ad revenue. The less traffic that comes to your website, the more that impacts your traffic thus directly affecting your ad revenue.

The original topic is about taking away money from the sources. Google taking your data and presenting it is taking away traffic because there is less traffic to the website of the data source due to less ad revenue.