Final answer:
Pop-up ads are advertisements that appear on a webpage and are not related to SEO, phishing, or cookies. They are specifically designed for promotional purposes and are different from other concepts of online advertising and malicious attempts.
Step-by-step explanation:
When you see an ad while researching hotels online, that's part of pop-up ads. Pop-up ads are forms of online advertising that appear over a user's viewed web page, often without their direct intention to access them. These advertisements can be triggered by visiting a website or by performing a specific action on a site. Despite sometimes being a nuisance, these ads are designed to attract web traffic or capture email addresses. Unlike phishing, which is a malicious attempt to acquire sensitive information by disguising oneself as a trustworthy entity, or cookies, which are used to track user behavior across sites, pop-up ads are primarily for promotion. Also, they are not associated with search engine optimization (SEO), which is a set of practices used to increase the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine's unpaid results.