If you depend entirely on search engines for sure. I do not have a commercial site but if I did I would pay other popular and related sites to link to me in a classy non spammy way. I would also pay influencers to link to me and talk about my site.

I could totally imagine Joe Rogan saying, "Hey Jamie, what was that site? Oh yeah go to ai dash sucks dash bfdd dot newsdump dot org to get your copy of an SSH banner today."

I've had traffic sent to me long ago from paying into Google's program but it was mostly bots. This was in the 2003-2009 time-frame. I imagine by now it's not much better.