The issue you're describing is ranking results or ranking between promoted/ad content.

The problem more at hand is unless you're paying big bucks, they can and will place content that at best is another competitor, or at worst is genuinely trying to harm your users. Ads being inline and as close in appearance to regular results as google can legally get away with is the problem. There are heavily misaligned incentives at play, ones that enable a lot of malware and phishing attempts.

No, I’m definitely not talking about ranking - that’s downstream of my point.

I’m talking about the “simple” solution that everyone alludes to but can’t seem to explain how it would feasibly work.