Does Display ad backlinks affect organic traffic?

[dm57]

I know Google has said historically ads have nothing to do with organic traffic, but my research has proven otherwise. If you have Ahrefs, or another backlink tool, go to any highly competitive keyword (like "loan payment calculator") the first organic place you'll get might be bankrate.com. Check their backlinks and you'll see millions of backlinks from yahoo finance, and if you go to those pages, you'll see... you guessed it... display ads!
And it makes sense! Display ads are backlinks to your website, so how is Google not lying about ads affecting organic traffic here?

[Dimitri]

the first organic place you'll get might be

Might or might not, when I run this search (using a US IP), this site is not even on the front page...

Search results are customized , so may be the reason you see this site ranking first, might be because Google believes this is the site you are looking for , based on the profiling they have on you.

Now about backlinks and display ads. It's not because Ahrefs counts these links that search engines do.

Most ad networks are NOT serving ads to search engine crawlers, or/and, ads are served from locations which are blocked at the server level, or using robots.txt.

So, I highly doubt that, when GoogleBot crawls Yahoo's pages, it sees the display ads
...

The site you mentioned might rank higher because of its display ads, because of the amount of visitors it receives from these ads... Google might see this site receives lot of traffic and this can contributes in building the authority of the site.