I think this is giving Google too much credit.

Sure, some of it was about getting people to search multiple times so they get more ad impressions.

But, a big part of it is that Google has been waging war against SEO and spam from day 1, and they're losing ground / lost.

This explanation that it was just a way to make more money implies that if Google wanted they could show you the exact results you wanted, but I don't think that's true anymore.

Google's initial algorithm was Page Rank. They looked at how many sites linked to your site. The more sites that linked to it, the more people who thought your site was high quality. You couldn't game it by anything you put on your site because the ranking came from other people's impressions of you. But with enough money, that was easily defeated by buying up / starting up thousands of sites and promoting another site by linking to it.

Since then it has been a cat and mouse game. Google tweaks their process to reduce inauthentic "recommendations", the SEO people change their methods and get back into the top results. For a while Google was winning, but even before AI, they were already losing more and more often.

The rise of Facebook and other social media just made it worse. Google didn't have deep visibility into these sites, so they couldn't carefully look over metadata to help judge whether something was authentic. Meanwhile, it became cheaper and cheaper to put up inauthentic content that attempted to boost a site's placement on Google.

I think the pivot to AI is as much Google admitting defeat in the war against SEOs as it is about them trying to make money from a new venture.