A huge consequence of the prioritization of clicks is the loss of quality reporting. Those shuttered newspapers who went the way of the dinosaurs carried with them hundreds of years of journalistic experience. A lot of it didn't transfer to modern news sites. Now we're paying the price with young, inexperienced "journalists" pumping out junk articles with poor sourcing, missing or wrong facts, etc. I can't find it now but one of the better modern journalists (Glenn Greenwald or Bob Woodward maybe?) had a great piece on this. He lamented how mainstream media is failing to maintain their journalistic standards because they're too biased and they haven't been taught how to be good journalists.

I think Google should focus heavily on this, but their PR doesn't mention it much. Quality journalists first, then quality tools.