[disgruntledphd2]

In a previous life, I worked with an online travel agent (you'll note I don't say for).

One of their major income streams was promoting certain providers in order to get more commission, so that if two providers had approximately similar inventory, then the one paying better commission typically gets placed at the top.

[spuz]

I understand how that happens when you're talking to a sales person - it's their job so they want to get the best commission they can.

A comparison website is just an algorithm. The deal at the top is the one with the cheapest quoted price. The price comes directly from the insurer so the comparison website has little control in which results are shown to the user. The only control they might have would be to remove low return insurers from their result set (in which case why partner with them at all?) or more likely present a high return result as a special or premium offer in which case they have to sell that to the customer on the basis of value for money.

[disgruntledphd2]

Nope, in this case the algorithm was tuned to deliver the highest commission for them. It's a really, really stupid technique, and leads to poor conversion, but that aim of grasping for every bit you can get out of your local maximum is a difficult habit to break (and a worse one to codify in an algorithm).