If Google were to have the astoundingly poor business sense to secretly allow payment for higher 'organic' search rankings: they'd hopefully at least have the good sense to not blow that secret on a fish as small as Fandom.

Theoretically, you can't pay for placement on Google without it being labelled an ad.

Practically, you can pay SEO experts to help you keep your rankings up.

They don’t need to. Fandom benefits from being an old and popular site. Google manually adjusts their ranking to prioritize such sites, because they think those sites are what the “average” searcher expects to see come up when they search certain topics.

Essentially, Google fears that the average searcher will think Google is broken if certain popular sites don’t come up in their results.