The problem is you have no choice. If Google is slowly killing you via starvation, but it's still feeding you crumbs at the moment. Nobody's answer is going to be to refuse the crumbs.
> Nobody's answer is going to be to refuse the crumbs.
Except those that think about opportunity cost.
Google's instant answers is a case of them putting the user first and that's hardly ever the wrong decision.
Instant answers is a direct threat to organized knowledge on the Internet, and that can't, by definition, be putting the user first. When we look at my link in my original comment, we discover that instant answers gets Google a larger percentage of the ad money (all of it), and suddenly, we figure out who Google is putting first: Google.
I think your worry about this overblown. If Google doesn't do a good job with these, then that's an opportunity for somebody to do a better job.
If you are stuck on an ad-supported model from the days of the dot-com boom, then I'm not sure you have a place in the current ecosystem where a lot of searches are started with a voice query and the user expects a short, definitive answer. The ever increasing number of searches that result in no clicks is surely influenced by the rise of Google Assistant, Amazon Echo, Siri, etc...
I don't think it holds up for commercial sites, but for news, hobbies, and blogs (which have been hit hardest by Google's vampire advertisement business) your statement is true for me!
1. User opens the browser, which defaults to the correct website the user is looking for.
2. User goes to Google instead, and searches for the company name. Clicks on the link for the company.
3. User navigates through the company website for the exact same page that the browser was set to open to by default.
Most people won't, perhaps, but I run a handful of reasonably popular websites, and I block Google's crawlers. I have no use for Google.