It&#x27;s no answer at all, and it&#x27;s certainly not a foregone conclusion.  They could easily just blame it on a rogue employee etc, and there is absolutely no reason to believe that they would lose business, since competitors would be equally suspect.<p>If they wanted to actually rebut this they could easily say something much stronger such as: &quot;This would be absolutely against company policy, and we have process in place to safeguard against it which we publicly document.&quot;<p>The problem is that the search results almost certainly <i>do</i> reflect the company&#x27;s biases even without any intentional rigging, so they can&#x27;t answer that way.