We're long beyond the era of Google Search as a means for "discover new stuff" or to surface the best information on a given topic. Before the 2020s LLMs, spammers were getting the upper hand.

These days, if you have an Android phone and/or are part of the Google ecosystem, Google services overall are very useful for things like "find restaurant near me", etc or finding places to buy stuff, etc. But for intellectual pursuits or the idea "the portal to the open web", Google Search has been dead a long time.

It's been very rare for many years now that I enter anything into Google search that isn't generic information that I can find by searching Wikipedia or even using ChatGPT and I'll typically use those directly instead.

So it's rational and expected for publishers to do this. Google Search provides fewer and fewer benefits over time.