For example, if I look up a given book. The first results will be amazon and good reads, fair enough, but the reviews have been gamed so I'm not going to bother with them. Then it's the blogs that have managed to figure out SEO. They read in a similar style to recipe websites, and I haven't seen any good ones in that category. Then I will find a reddit thread about the book, hopefully on a subgenre subreddit and not just r/books, that convinces me to get it or not and has recommendations for books similar to it.
If you get far enough you will find some personal blog that doesn't care about SEO. HN has link farm threads every now and then where people post theirs, and I have seen some individuals who post insightful book reviews, but you will not come across those in a search engine.
Eg if I type best linux distro the first suggestion often is "best linux distro reddit". It happens for me too.
The fact that a lot of people are doing that is obvious from your observation that it's the first suggestion