I'm thinking it's SEO cargo culting, and that there are a lot more "monkey see, monkey do" patterns of behavior that don't impact actual ranking but nonetheless crop up in weird things like this.

That said, I cannot wait for adtech to go the way of the rotary phone. Localized, private search indexes on phones with local AI interacting with them, only reaching out to the internet when necessary to update information, with hashes and checksums to minimize the number of updates needed for frequently interacted sites, and so on.

Google right now is hot garbage - most tiny competitors are far better, let alone yandex or kagi or the like.

I thought the SEO was to keep churning out garbage articles in order to make the page more desirable to search engines because it was more recent. At least that is how it feels, like the search engines are promoting recent content over good content and pages take advantage of this by auto generated trash. to the point I won't even look at a page if it has a date in the last year.