We sell advertising, not search results

With most results above the fold being ads these days, this is a pretty tone deaf message to put out there.

Relevant thread on the homepage right now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22107823

With their most recent design, it’s nigh impossible to even identify an ad from a search result.

Start and maintain a $100/month adwords account, and magically, one's domain gets free SEO (moving up in ancillary search results) --> every S.E.O advice on the internet openly states this.

Is this true? It seems plausible, but by the same token also seems like the kind of protip that isn't actually true.

Someone with deeper pockets and some free time could test this I suppose: Start 6 blogs with mediocre content - the goal being to avoid getting organic links from other websites. Buy $100/mo/site of AdWords for 6 months. And then measure which one performs better in searches.

Top SEO strategy advice sites often carry this kind of advice: https://moz.com/blog/how-google-adwords-ppc-affects-organic-...

This is what Google used to be like. They have fallen a long way from this high ground.