Can't Disable "Sponsored" in Brave Search

Description of the issue:

Recently re-installed Brave Browser for a fresh restart after disabing Brave Rewards. Made sure that Brave Rewards weren’t enabled. Disabled the sponsored images in the new tab. However, I am still getting sponsored results in brave search. When checking brave://rewards-internals/ I can see “Opted into search result ads: true”. For the rest is “false”. How do I disable this? Specfically cut ties with brave rewards and re-installed to not see them anymore.

Brave Version (check About Brave): 1.76.74

Operating System: MacOS 15.3.2