The other problem is that no one actually clicks on fucking links anymore anyway. All of these websites are designed for you to feed them traffic, not for their site/app to feed your property traffic - they don't have intuitive features etc to really drive traffic the same way the SEO of olde would have worked. They want you to buy ads, and those ads they want people to click on so they can charge you more for the ads, they don't actually care about anything else.
Surly/Shaggy used to be a top ranked result on nearly anything with a thread over 3 pages. Like top 10 on google, definitely page 1. We have a lot of content, and good content at that. They have changed everything to derank anything but reddit from discussions and virtually everything you click on is nearly identical copypasta garbage because a ton of articles that are well written are now behind paywalls.
Effectively the internet has become a bunch of little fiefdoms and the taxes you pay are to send people to your little fiefdom that may be interested in it. The scam is that I bet if I spent $5000 on google/meta/whatever ads I'd get a $3000 boost in traffic from the display ads shown here to the new blood that comes to the site. If your site is sticky you can game around that, but if not you effectively are losing money to inflate your top line (which is all most people care about).
It's insane that there's more margin in the ads for these tech companies than there is on the high margin products that get sold through. Example if you have a great item you get mfg somewhere where the supply chain was (lol tariffs) cheap and you can get lets call it a 55% margin on a $25-30 product because of that, now you need people to buy it. Well what people aren't factoring into the real margin for those products is the marketing cost and the sales cost etc. For every $25-30 dollar product you sell if you are spending $5-6 dollars per for people to even know it exists, then another $1.50-$2.00 to process payment and another $.75-$1 to manage the inventory or whatever bs on it.
Everything is a scheme for big tech to suck out $$