When a Brand Query Puts the Brand Fifth: Google’s Pay-to-Play Problem

Searching for “Midjourney” on Google returned the official site as only the fifth result, overshadowed by ads and lesser alternatives. The author contends this pay-to-play system forces even top products to buy visibility to prevent competitors from leapfrogging them. He argues this reflects a broader decay in Google Search quality and calls for a fix—or an end to it.

Key Points

• A direct brand search for “Midjourney” surfaced the official site only as the fifth result.
• Ads and sponsored listings push more relevant, user-intended results down the page.
• Success on Google now requires both organic strength (backlinks) and paid ads to avoid being outranked.
• Competitors can pay to appear above the brand users actually seek, distorting relevance.
• The situation is presented as symptomatic of Google Search’s broader quality decline and misaligned incentives.

Sentiment

The community overwhelmingly agrees with the article. Virtually no one defends Google's search quality. The most common reaction is to pile on with additional examples of the same problem across other platforms, reinforcing the article's thesis. The few dissenting voices do not defend Google so much as express skepticism that alternatives will remain better long-term or note that competitive ad bidding is an industry-wide norm.

In Agreement

• The same brand-squatting problem extends to Google Play Store, Apple App Store, and Amazon, where searching for a specific product consistently shows paid competitors first
• Misleading search ads create real security threats — elderly users have been scammed by fake tech support numbers, phishing sites, and fraudulent app clones appearing above legitimate results
• A former Firefox team member confirmed Google used to prohibit competitive trademark bidding but reversed course to monetize it, revealing this as a deliberate policy shift rather than algorithmic drift
• Forcing brands to buy ads on their own names functions as a protection racket — pay Google or lose traffic to competitors hijacking your trademark
• Kagi uses Google's own index but strips the ads and presents clean results, proving Google's degraded search experience is a deliberate choice for profit
• Ad blockers are now a security necessity rather than a convenience, with even the FBI having previously recommended their installation

Opposed

• Competitive trademark bidding is standard advertising practice that large businesses willingly participate in because they can also bid on competitors' names
• AI search alternatives like Perplexity are wildly subsidized and will likely face the same ad-infested pressure once they need to become profitable
• Some of the blame lies with governments and organizations that fail to protect their own services from middlemen, not just with Google
• Google's poor search results are a carefully planned and tested design decision — they could fix it but won't because the current approach is more profitable, which is a different problem than incompetence