I suspect this boils down to a cost/benefit tradeoff.

The cost of strictly enforcing stated rules for ads is felt immediately and fully by Google. It is concrete, measurable, and probably non-insignificant; the benefit is essentially goodwill from the narrow sliver of the web that is verbal about this. That is intangible, difficult to measure, even harder to assign a reasonable dollar value to (meaning the ROI could look negative), and the benefit would accrue to parties other than Google who might not even notice.

Because they get paid and can always wait before banning them without fingers pointing at them too hard.

Sigh.

I reported months ago that Google's continual growth rate in revenues from Ads should be heeded with caution - its not from AI/LLMs.

They are juicing and juicing and juicing their existing assets for all the cash flows they can generate! That's why the revenues keep growing. They did not go to such extremities in the past - and they probably strategically held back.

Meta is facing the same predicament btw - both entities claim the growth is coming from new AI investments. The amount of impersination/Scam ad's I've seen on IG is hilarious. That is a flat out lie its from investments they made pre-LLM hype + efficiency gains.

Keep up these efforts to name and shame. If Google won’t act on these things because it doesn’t make them money, because they are unregulated, or because they are lazy, they might because it still cuts their credibility and reputation. Especially here on HN where Google is no longer considered such a darling by developers and thinkers.

> However, if you were being uncharitable, you do have to question whether it’s in Google’s interest to remove adverts that get lots of clicks.

That is it. They don't do it because it goes against their interests. Google is a scummy company doing scummy things. There is very little else to it.

yall better ba carefull with that ads and shi

Google gave up, they know they’ve lost Search to ChatGPT

I previously noted that the top search result for Claude Code was linking to a spyware website. It's crazy how this stuff is not monitored at all.

Because they make money by that.

Sometimes simple answers are not only elegant, but capture the essence of a problem.

> AI is really good at detecting deceptive adverts - why isn’t Google using it?

Because Google is an adCompany. It will not do anything about ads - quite the opposite, it has fought down ublock origin. Everyone sees that.