For all people complain about the decline in ad revenue, there's still clearly a strong incentive to get click-bait responses.

I honestly wonder if the solution isn't to fight the SEO wars forever, but to just cut this shit off at the root and screen out sites that host ads, period. Obviously, Google can't limit its search by screening out folks that use AdSense because... that's half their business model. But perhaps a search engine that does bias itself against sites that monetize click-throughs could dramatically improve results.