Search engines certainly recognize the opportunity and dilemmas they have introduced into doing business on the internet. Like the commercial real estate broker who drives the hard bargain on commercial sites that will bring success to a business in that location, the search engines have realized their symbiotic relationship with businesses in need of the traffic that search engines earn through their brand recognition and perceived relevancy of search results.
Search engines not only sell prime location through the positioning of bid-for-placement sponsored listings, they are selling leads. Businesses and non-profits can buy search engine placement as discussed previously. They would not continue if PPC expenditures were not exceeded by business initiated from search engines.If you look farther down the chain, some lead generation focused websites pay for prime placement in search results and then sell the leads they generate from their visitors to actual service providers or retailers who prefer to reserve their marketing budgets for actual leads rather than potential leads.
When you fill out a contact form in return for a free IQ test, you may really be delivering your personal details to an interested business who buys leads from the website you are interacting with. Protecting consumers from bad experiences resulting from providing personal details over the Internet is why most websites provide a Privacy Policy document linked from their homepage.