Since search engines are now flooded with automatically generated trash, the solution is probably a return to the old ways this problem was solved before Google.
The problem is that any automated discovery mechanism is quickly ruined by automated spam/ads created to exploit it.
So the most reliable discovery mechanisms are still small communities of real people. But because they're good - they attract more and more people until the quality reverts to the mean, and it's mostly just junk/spam/ads again.
Social media companies are extremely prone to cancer - if you will. A large part of long they survive is in how good they are at fighting off the junk created by their own users.
In a way - the internet (or at least the DNS system) is just the top level social media company that made absolutely no attempt to fight the cancer. It's value died a long time ago, and it's mostly a wasteland of junk now.
It was a problem back then, but we had multiple search engines instead of just Google.
If you optimized for Google, you almost certainly de-optimized for the others. Once Google became the defacto monopoly, websites didn't have to worry about this anymore.
What people need is a search engine that they can tune to themselves. Unfortunately, the net is really big now, and it's not clear how you can index it in a cost-effective manner.