This already has a name — people call it GEO/AEO. I do the legitimate end of it for my own site: structured data, clean factual pages, llms.txt, so that when an assistant answers a question in my domain it cites the source correctly. Right now the incentives are healthy, because the only way to "rank" in an answer is to be genuinely accurate and citable.
Paid placement inside answers breaks that alignment. Why invest in being citable when you can buy the token stream? Search took about fifteen years to fully make that trade. LLMs seem to be starting on it in year three.
Interesting that this was flagged when it is about the exact phenomenon being discussed, as I was also about to mention AEO until I read this comment. It is really not very different from SEO in that if you want your site to be ranked, it should have clean information, and don't try to game the system as otherwise you'll be banned like Google has done for decades now.