Author links to https://support.google.com/websearch/thread/308719098/page-a... which says:

> Now, we’ll extract interesting information from Google Knowledge Graph entities and highlight them in line. When the user clicks on the highlighted entity, it will open the app tray, so you can easily find out more information, right when curiosity strikes. This new experience allows people to quickly get additional context about people, places or things.

These aren't ads as in what is served through AdWords.

It doesn't matter, it's still an ad. Adwords aren't the only form of ads. See the reviews and purchase links in the screenshot? That's how Google is going to profit from this.

Adwords is only a small part of the modern day Google's monetization efforts. Today, they're doing everything they can to prevent users navigating away from Google property[1]. They plagiarize content from other websites and put it above search results. By 2020, less than 2/3 of Google searches ended in a click to traditional search results [2]. Why would they do that? So that they can show you more ads, of course.

This is yet another attempt to direct users away from the websites they were browsing to Google's ad platform. It's particularly egregious because it's disguised as the website's own doing.

[1]: https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2020/07/28/google-sea...

[2]: https://sparktoro.com/blog/in-2020-two-thirds-of-google-sear...