I appreciate the shit on your shoe analogy. It's completely outrageous that they could even conceive of such a scam.

Triggering add revenue with ghost queries is only one step away from paying an overseas click-farm to click the ads to make it look like real users were doing it. And that's only one step away from simply fudging the numbers. And that's only one step away from complete fabrication and simply sending their advertisers a bill for whatever they want, no service of any kind required. Perhaps Google hasn't completely descended to the bowels of enshittification hell, but they are well on their way.