Pressed an ad by accident which immediately brought up apple pay

You cannot complete or authorize an Apple Pay transaction without entering your Face ID or passcode.

Did you use your Face ID or passcode?

VT would be Virus Total, the scanning service you had mentioned using.

Apple has not AFAIK never claimed that iPhone cannot have malware. Apple have listed vulnerabilities potentially being actively exploited, and have mentioned various defenses against malware including Lockdown, and have mentioned mercenary spyware and targeted exploits: About Apple threat notifications and protecting against mercenary spyware - Apple Support

Some individuals may well make claims of invulnerability of course, but then some folks also claim the world is flat.

Nothing happened here, other than getting surprised with an Apple Pay dialog.

Enjoy the rest of your day.

Might want to spend less time in sites with surprise Apple Pay prompts, though.

Mattwallace5 wrote:

You don't think there is any chance I was infected with malware from visiting this site do you? I ran it through virus total and it seemed fine but its relatively new and wouldn't have been flagged by a lot I imagine

Of course there is a chance your device was infected.

Proving a negative (particularly with complex equipment) is somewhere between difficult and impossible.

Is it likely? No. This based on available information on iPhone malware.

But for all I know, you have somehow become interesting to an immensely well-funded adversary with access to immensely expensive exploit tooling. A Bad Day can follow.

Given your familiarity with and use of VT, you are undoubtedly well aware of this possibility of course, and are also aware of the limits of VT itself, so I’m mildly curious why you're asking about certainty.

I’d suggest trying other available search engines too, as I’ve found Google results and Google ads have been filled with SEO’d content, and variously with malware.

DuckDuckGo (associated with the Bing search index) is an alternative I’ve used as the default for some years, and results tends to be less SEO’d than are my Google searches.

There are other fine search engines available.