[lolinder]

> that looks suspiciously like what an ad would say ... fake comparison sites pretending to be genuine content.

This is already a thing under Google's system: if a result isn't an ad-ridden mess, it's content marketing trying to sell an adjacent product.

You haven't addressed the conflict of interest that Google has as the largest vendor of ads on the internet. Right now, Kagi's sole job is to help me find what I'm looking for. If SEO started to game their current algorithm, the incentive would be for Kagi to improve their algorithm and win the meta game. If they fail to do so, their payments will dry up as people look for an engine that will.

Google has no such incentive. If their algorithms consistently drive traffic to pages that have their ads on them, Google is incentivized to keep that traffic flowing, regardless of how SEO'd the content is. The user isn't Google's customer, the advertiser is.