What is search good for?
Why do people use Google or other search engines?
1.To find out some piece of information.
2.To find something to buy.
3.To learn about something.
4.To find someone selling something.
Lot of other reasons, all different.
AI summaries do 1 quite well most of the time. No need to click on anything.
Amazon, EBay, Temu etc are the best for 2 so go there instead.
A website concerning some particular subject matter is the best for 3 so the best way to find those is to actually go through the search results.
The advertisements that are presented are effective for 4 so just click the first thing you see.
Why do individual websites want to be at the top of web results?
So they can sell ads.
So they can convince visitors of something.
So they can show others that they are useful or influential or that they are worth something.
All of these are the same thing.
Does a website that contains information on some particular subject matter for the purpose of making such subject matter available to anyone who wants to learn about stuff need to care if lots of people are visiting? Not really. It achieves its purpose simply by existing and being available.
Google sells ads,
They succeed by convincing advertisers that they are worth purchasing advertising on,
They do this by showing searchers that they are useful for searching for stuff,
They do this by providing results to searches that are good enough to convince lots of searchers to use google for searching.
It is not Google's place to support the business of competitors.
It is not Google's place to help searchers as its primary goal.
In fact lots of people get grumpy when Google provides useful information to a wide array of different searches. There is a whole industrial infrastructure that supports the creation of takedown notices to remove useful search results.
Thinking that Google is anything other than a machine for generating advertising revenue or might still be a tool that primarily serves the goal of making things easy to find on the internet is silly.