Comment by eastbound

> Best exercise bike articles, and such, are what lots of people people actually search for

Google doesn’t have to return the SEO-optimized page. Google has other options:

- Return 10 results of the 10 top products,

- Derank any site that seems SEO-optimized,

- Derank any commercial site,

- Derank any site with a cookie banner (implying the user is tracked and the writer is trying to write what the user wants to read) or the infamous mailing list popup,

- Prioritize comparisons from brick-and-mortar journals, or give credentials to other vectors of trust,

- Act as a paid directory, where only paid answers appear,

- Return individual positive and negative comments about products, extracted from review pages, maybe even in a graph (“Good for USB-C according to 95% of the reviews, provides an electric shock according to 7% of non-affiliated comments”).

There WERE many options. Google CHOSE to rank awful sites that provide decreased value, and worse than that, it chose that all other sites won’t be viable, killing them. Google chose the face of the internet today.