Bear in mind that there is a vast amount of clicking on "wasted" adverts, i.e. paid adverts which would have been the top result of an organic search anyway, e.g. eBay spending $20M a year on ads targeting the keyword "eBay", which they thought was great because it appeared to give a $245.6m return on investment, until they switched it off for a bit and realised they got pretty much the same traffic and conversion rate without the massive advertising spend[0].

[0] https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-h...

I would say that may be true for the average HN reader, but in my experience definitely not true for the average overall user.

Based on the linked study [0], 57% of people can't tell the difference between a Google ad and an organic search result.

[0] https://varn.co.uk/01/18/varn-original-research-almost-60-pe...

I've never clicked an ad in my life