Google has already been caught out doing this. They reduced the quality of search results and placed ads and SEO (companies that pay to be first in the SEO rankings) ahead of other results. This was happening before they had a Gen AI LLM.
It's intent is to keep you on the search page longer, viewing ads so they can get more ad revenue.
They're an ad aggregation company first and foremost and search (along with their other suite of products) is how they serve those ads.
Seems like it could be fun to mess around with.
I bet there's some correlation there. After all, if you're religious you're a lot more likely to believe things told to you by a supposed authority figure. Still, correlation does not equal causation.
There was a point where tires were expensive but they lasted a long time because so few people had cars and they didn't drive them often. So two brothers who owned a tire company were trying to figure out how to sell more tires to the few people who owned cars.
The answer was to get them to wear their tires out faster by providing a list of places they could visit that would warrant the expense of wearing down their tires.
So the stat rating was more of a "this place is worth a visit/road trip system. And they published this list and it caught on and then restaurants wanted to get Michelin stars for the notariety and the essentially free press.
My problem is that the medium is how I can recall it. So if I did write it all out by hand, I would need scratch paper in order to write it all out to be able to tell it to someone else to prove I know it. This happened to me in school a lot.