> advertisers REALLY don't want you to do that because it's far too easy to cheat.
I expect that they are already cheating as much as possible to convince their customers to continue paying for advertising that has a negligible effect on the bottom line.
Adtech and PR firms would have you believe that it is impossible to sell a product or service online without first paying them $10k/m. It's also why google search is so awful - if they could get you the information you were looking for they are sidelining their customers, so their search has to, by design, be limited so that their customers are more prominent in the search results than non-customers.
Note: I'm not saying that this is by design; they could get to this stable equilibrium simply by each isolated team within search, advertising, etc aggressively pursuing its own metrics.
