Agreed, and the ad is often immediately above the native search result 1-2.

I'm guessing clicking the ad costs the company money per click, and the native search result doesn't? If I'm explicitly searching for a company, and I'd prefer that they don't have to incur an advertising penalty on my behalf, I'd need to scroll past the first result to the second.

We regularly bid for our own keyword and it is super competitive as competitors are always trying to buy our company name. It is awkward when you type "My company", and the first page is all competitor ads

Companies buy those ads on their own search results so a competitor can't target them for advertising

Agreed as that’s my assumption. Do you have first-hand experience and/or a source?

Every single company I've ever worked for that advertised online had a "cost of doing business" ad budget just for buying their own keyword on Google (and Apple iOS Store/Google Play Store if they had consumer apps). Bigger international companies often have someone from an ad consulting firm tracking the major search engines and buying keywords for all of the big ones like Google, Bing, Yandex, etc.

It's one of those "the sky is blue" type of things in advertising. You NEVER want a competitor to have a shot at advertising to your potential customers, especially when they've gone to the point where they're typing in your name into Google so their conversion rate is likely significantly larger than your average site visitor.

See, this is the kind of thing I knew would happen, rent seeking from the rest of the economy because the bar has risen and you have to pay, not because you get some economic benefit from paying for ads compared to the baseline prior to Google.

Google has become a bloodsucker on the economy. You and I are the ones paying in higher goods and services costs passed on to us. Worse, the bidding has no natural upper bound.

I'm not into that stuff much but this may be the reason why there's often bad ads if you search for popular foss software binaries like LibreOffice or Gimp.

The browser vendors are in bed with the search providers. You can't bookmark a site or go directly to it, it always goes via search. No wonder companies want native apps rather then web pages, then the user get an icon on the app drawer/desktop, and they don't have to pay the middle man.

I never click the ads and always scroll down to the native results as I don't want to get involved with their marketing games and not to put burden on the content providers.

The cost of an ad depends on its 'quality'. A big part of the quality score is based on a model of how useful that result will be to the user.

Therefore, ads for a company that appear when the company name is clicked are considered highly relevant and useful, and therefore have a very high quality score and therefore very low price.

That’s not google’s direct doing. Google sells ads relevant to searches so you as a company want to buy ads on your name to prevent a competitor for doing the same. Imagine a competitor bought did that for tour company. Your business would take a hit.

Has anyone sued someone for buying ad spaces for one's company or product name like stepping on domain names with malicious intent?