Search engines and SEO spam
Big money in SEO, I had an acquaintance all the way back in the early 2000s that had tens of thousands of domains that he ran experiments on to reverse engineer how the algorithm worked. He also had tens of thousands he ran SEO/link networks on. He made a lot of money for a long time by being front page for a lot of terms.Same thing is happening today, there are just more of these actors doing it. They just game the algorithm for terms related to products. Notice you still get decent serps in Google for terms that don’t relate to something that can be sold using an affiliate link.Fairly easy problem to fix, but Google would have to hire a black hat to help solve it. But the good ones ain’t gonna work there.