Oh god, of course they are. Haven’t checked on Microsoft News in a while, but the last time I did, they were promoting tons upon tons of transphobic propaganda.

They’re called MFAs (Made For AdSense), nothing changed since the early AdSense days. It’s unlikely that Google is knowingly boosting them, it’s just that search engines have always been easy to game with artificial link building and keyword density maximization, MFA owners happen to be among the people most likely to invest a lot in cheating their way to the top of search engine rankings. AI only made creating MFAs easier.

So just websites then? They’re all designed to maximize ad space over content anyway.