Can lack of sponsored content reduce trust in a list/ranking?

We've been doing some research on a website of ours. On this website we help the user pick the cheapest product for what they are searching for (example: TV / Smartwatch etc).

In the heatmaps we see that if there is no sponsored content, most of the users click the second option. While if we do show sponsored content, most of the users select the first non-sponsored option. The sponsored content is, in all cases, clearly marked paid content.

While doing user interviews (for general research) we noticed that a lot of users say they do not trust 'websites that compare stuff' because they do not know if the content is sponsored or not.

In the user interviews after a usertest the user says they picked the second option in the non sponsored list because it looked the best for them. Users that had sponsored content also picked the second one and gave the somewhat the same reply.

However in the sponsored list the 3rd option would be the same option as the 2nd in the non sponsored list.

So my question is as followed, would showing sponsored content increase the trust of the list because it is clearly marked? And when there is no sponsored content, would the user pick the second because they maybe assume the first is sponsored content?

Note: The usertests were qualitative and not quantitative