Why Calling Yourself the Best Could Be Helping Your Competitors Win in AI Search

Google appears to have decoupled what it cites from who it recommends. For many brands, ranking yourself #1 could be a vote for your rivals.

One of the most popular tactics to influence responses in AI search has been to create a "listicle" article that lists the best brands, products, or services in a given industry, and to rank the same company publishing the article as the best option in the space.

The industry calls these "self-promotional listicles," and to date, they've undoubtedly served as one of the most effective ways to influence AI answers, putting aside whether it's a smart branding idea to post biased content that has the potential to erode trust with any human reader who encounters it.

But after analyzing 100 B2B "best [category]" queries across Google's AI Overviews — pulling the actual answers and their cited sources at three different dates between April and June 2026 - I believe that Google has made changes to how it treats self-promotional listicles in generative AI responses.

And now, for many sites, self-promoting listicles might actually be more of a liability than an asset. Imagine being cited as a source, but not the recommended brand in the answer - while the competitors you mentioned in your listicle get recommended in your place.

If you're primarily focused on tracking 'AI citations' as a success metric for AI search, I have bad news for you: a self-serving listicle can earn you a citation, but in many cases, it can backfire, serving as a vote for your competitors as recommendations while leaving your brand out of the AI answer entirely.

This isn't just a hunch from a few screenshots or anecdotes (although I have seen more and more people coming to similar conclusions). Across the categories I tracked, a self-promoter's own listicle got cited but left out of the recommendation roughly two-thirds (69%) of the time, and I'll walk through exactly how I measured it throughout this article.

Citations have already proven to be a questionable metric to track to measure AI search success, given that LLMs are designed to provide the full answer without the user needing to click anywhere. We've all seen first-hand the low referral traffic numbers flowing into our client accounts from AI assistants. A Pew Research study from 2025 also found that when a Google search produced an AI summary, users clicked a link within the summary itself in just 1% of visits.

Given how AI search is evolving, I'd argue that between the choice of earning a citation or earning a brand recommendation, the recommendation is what actually matters - by an order of magnitude - especially given that an increasing number of users are using voice features when using AI assistants.

What Actually Changed with Listicles in AI Responses?

Here's my read on what changed: I believe Google adjusted how it treats self-promotional listicles for many queries, and the results appear to depend entirely on how established, authoritative, and well-recommended your brand already is.

In short, Google's adjustment appears to have devalued self-promotional listicles as an effective tactic for the average site, so that whether one still works now depends almost entirely on the strength of the brand publishing it.

If you're an established, authoritative brand, you can still publish a listicle calling your brand the best, and you may get both cited and recommended. But I'd argue it might not be worth it, given the distaste it can leave with readers, and the potential for this type of page to become a liability if/when Google chooses to crack down harder on "inauthentic mentions." We've already seen the first signs, which I'll explain later in this article.

Plus, for established brands, plenty of other sites are likely already recommending you - which is what appears to actually move the needle in AI Overview responses in the first place. Furthermore, given how much scrutiny self-promoting listicles are now getting in the media (more on that later), it might not be the best look.

If you're a smaller brand, though, you may actually be shooting yourself in the foot by publishing self-promotional listicles. Google may be treating your own article as a vote for your competitors, while leaving you out of the recommendation entirely. I'll share examples later of what this looks like in practice.

The TL;DR:

According to my new research, when a B2B brand publishes its own "best [category]" listicle that ranks itself as #1, Google's AI surfaces (AI Overviews + AI Mode) may cite that listicle as a source but leave the self-promoting brand out of the actual recommendation roughly two-thirds (69%) of the time. The AI Overview recommendations consistently go to the established category leaders instead.

How Widespread Have Listicles Become?

It's no secret that self-promotional listicles have worked to influence how AI answers recommend brands since language models were first launched. The tactic has become particularly popular in the SaaS space. For example, this is one of hundreds* of articles Shopify has published where they call their own brand the #1 ecommerce platform for various use cases:

*Shopify previously had over 100 of these types of articles, but it appears that they are culling many of these pages from the site now.

One reason this tactic works so well comes down to SEO itself. These pages target the exact phrase "what is the best brand for X" - a phrase that, until recently, drew little competition, since most brands only began publishing pages aimed at these terms in the last couple of years. Before AI search and GEO arrived, there was a content void around questions like "which is the best brand for X?" or "what are the best [services]?" - largely, I'd argue, because most brands weren't comfortable putting such openly biased content in front of their human readers.

When it became clear that it worked as a GEO (AI search optimization) tactic, the approach was popularized and spammed at scale by thousands of companies, particularly in the B2B space. Not only has it now been showcased across dozens of SEO conferences, YouTube videos, online webinars, blogs, and industry publications, but the media also started to cover this exploit in recent months. I collaborated and spoke to a few journalists who recently wrote pieces exposing the efficacy of this method of influencing Google's AI responses:

• I hacked ChatGPT and Google's AI - and it only took 20 minutes - Thomas Germain, BBC

• How Accurate Are Google's A.I. Overviews? - Tripp Mickle et al., New York Times

• Your Search Results Are Getting Sloptimized - Will Oremus, The Atlantic

To measure whether self-serving listicles are actually proliferating (or whether it just feels that way), I had Claude pull every 'best [X] software' page where a vendor ranks its own listicle (usually at #1) from across my AI Overviews data: 184 self-promoting listicle pages across 146 brands (many brands publish more than one).

I used the Ahrefs MCP to grab the monthly organic traffic history for each individual URL, using the first month a page picked up organic traffic as a proxy for when it actually went live and started ranking in organic search. By stacking those launch dates up by year, the trend is hard to miss: this isn't a few opportunists, it's an industry-wide land grab that went viral in 2025 (likely with the 'GEO boom').

And this is only a tiny slice of the web: if the trend is this pronounced in my sample, the growth in this page type that Google and other search engines are seeing across their full index is certainly far larger. But the proliferation of these pages is only part of the question. The more interesting one - and the one that actually matters if you're deciding whether to keep pumping out these pages - is whether they still work. Not whether they can rank, and not whether they get cited, but whether they actually get your brand recommended in AI answers.

So, what is Google starting to do to combat this influx of pages meant to manipulate its AI responses?

Consequence #1: Google demoted these sites' organic visibility

Now that the tactic is everywhere, Google has started pushing back, and the first sign was in organic search earlier this year. In January of 2026, Google appears to have made an algorithmic adjustment that substantially demoted the organic visibility of the sites heavily employing this tactic, particularly affecting the subfolders that housed these self-promoting listicles.

Around January 20th, 2026, at least dozens of sites, including a handful of major, well-known brands, saw organic traffic begin to fall rapidly. I analyzed over 40 of these sites, including several clients I've helped since this adjustment.

Self-promotional listicles were one of several potential issues with these sites' approaches. Most affected companies were using a variety of tactics that could signal SEO/GEO spam to Google: scaling AI-generated content to drive SEO and AI search traffic; scaling pages following other SEO-driven formats (comparison/alternative pages, "who/what/when" pages), and, in most cases, excessive self-promotional listicles. And I'm not talking about one listicle or a handful: these sites often had hundreds, or even thousands, of articles calling their own brand the #1 best compared to the competition. The orange lines below show projected organic traffic, via Ahrefs:

Since that point, affected companies have generally seen the declines continue and affect more than just the targeted folder; many impacted sites have seen visibility drop across the entire domain, with drops accelerating during Google's recent May 2026 core update.

This impact is a good example of why employing SEO tactics that push the boundaries of Google's policies can be risky for the visibility of the entire domain; not just the content that violated its policies. And, as I've mentioned in previous Substack articles, losing SEO visibility can cause downstream effects on AI search visibility as well.

These algorithmic adjustments are just one part of the story. I believe Google in particular has recently made changes to how it uses information from these self-promotional listicles in AI Overviews.

Consequence #2: Google appears to be excluding many self-promoting brands from its recommendations

To pin down whether Google is dropping self-promoters from its AI recommendations, I set out to measure it directly. I had Claude pull the AI Overview answers for 100 B2B "best [category] software" queries, using the Ahrefs Brand Radar MCP, which provides AI Overview answer text and the exact sources it cited, and also lets me pull those answers at historical dates. You can view the full list of the keywords I analyzed here.

I chose one canonical question per category and grabbed it at three checkpoints (April 15, May 15, and June 8, 2026), so I was observing the same question and answer pair over time. For each answer, I separated the AI search metrics people often conflate when they judge whether a listicle worked:

• Cited: the brand's own "best [category]" listicle shows up in the answer's list of sources, either within the answer or in the sidebar.

• Recommendations: the brand is actually named as a pick in the AI Overview answer itself.

As it turns out, citations and recommendations can behave quite differently, and for self-promoting sites, the difference between them can lead to dramatically different business outcomes.

Here's what I found: Across the 80 prompts that triggered an AI Overview (notably, about 1 in 5 "best software" queries didn't surface an AI Overview at all), when a brand's own self-promotional listicle got cited as a source, that brand was left out of the actual recommendation 69% of the time (224 of the 323 self-promotional listicles cited across those prompts) on AI Overviews.

This wasn't a handful of edge cases, either. Across the three months, 74 of the 100 prompts I tracked (74%) returned an AI Overview answer that cited a self-promoter's own listicle, but left that brand out of the recommendation.

See the example below for the query "best LMS for selling courses," where Oasis LMS is cited all over the answer - both in-line and in the right sidebar - but the brand is not recommended in the response:

Despite its frequent citations in the answer, Oasis LMS is excluded as a recommendation from the response. In its cited article, it names itself as the #1 best "LMS for selling courses." While this self-recommendation doesn't influence the AI response, its mentions of competitors Kajabi, Thinkific, LearnWorlds and Teachable may have helped boost them, with all of them earning the AI Overview recommendation.

For the related query "best learning management system," note how Kredo Learning is cited in the right sidebar, but not recommended in the answer:

When visiting the cited URL, Kredo Learning lists its company as the Best LMS Platform in India. While its own brand is excluded from the response, its listed competitors TalentLMS and Docebo are recommended in the answer. The citation appears to act as a vote for Kredo Learning's competitors.

For another query, "best help desk software," notice how Pylon is listed as a citation under the "Help Scout" recommendation, despite not being one of the recommended brands:

Pylon does list its brand as the #1 brand in its cited article, but that self-endorsement does not influence the AI recommendations shown in AI Overviews. However, Pylon also recommends Zendesk, Freshdesk, and Help Scout in its article - the top 3 brands recommended in the answer.

Another self-promotional listicle that serves as a cited URL within the above AI Overview comes from Crisp, which is also not recommended in the answer. However, it recommends Zendesk, Freshdesk and Help Scout, which all made it into the recommendation.

For "best task management software," the self-promoting listicle by TMetric makes it into the sidebar as one of the cited pages used to build the response.

But despite recommending itself in its article, TMetric is not one of the recommended brands in the response. However, its listed competitors, Todoist, Asana, Trello, and ClickUp, all made it into Google's AI recommendation.

For the query "best survey software," Pollfish is cited heavily throughout the article with not one, but two self-promotional listicles. Despite their efforts, Pollfish is not a recommended brand in the response:

However, several of its recommended competitors - Qualtrics, SurveyMonkey, Google Forms, and Typeform, all made it into the recommendation (with Pollfish's article used as the citation for all).

Why Do Self-Promotional Listicles Work for Some Sites but Not Others?

This is where things get interesting. When you look at who does get recommended, the answer appears to be consistent: the established category leaders that are heavily recommended across many third-party pages, are frequently recommended in AI responses, and have substantial backlink profiles, compared to their self-promoting listicle competitors. If you notice that the self-promotional listicles can and do still work, I believe that Google might be giving a bit of a free pass to the companies who are already authoritative, trusted players in their respective industries.

Here are some examples: For "best project management software," Google's AI cites self-promoting listicles from Wrike, Paymo, Celoxis, and Kanbanchi, and then recommends well-known brands, Asana, Monday, ClickUp, and Notion. None of the self-promoting brands made the recommendation, but the well-known competitors they listed all did.

So what actually separates the brands that get recommended from the ones that only get cited? It's not how well the page is built: I checked, and the excluded brands often have perfectly strong, well-optimized pages and sites; that's why their listicle ranks and gets pulled in as a source in the first place. The real difference is how often the brand is talked about and linked to everywhere else - real authority signals.

Note: I want to caveat this section by saying it's difficult to figure out the real answer here (unless, of course, you work at Google). To add to that, there are some examples of lesser-known self-promoting listicle brands who occasionally make it into the answer, although this appears to be increasingly rare. I'll share how I took a stab at trying to figure this part out:

I used the Ahrefs Brand Radar MCP to pull various metrics related to how frequently a brand is mentioned in AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and how many backlinks its domain has as proxies for how well-known and authoritative the brand is. Below are a few examples of keywords I used to analyze the competitive landscape:

For "Best HR Software:" the recommended brands (BambooHR, Workday, Gusto, Deel, Rippling) have far more referring domains, AI Overview brand mentions and ChatGPT brand mentions than their cited-but-not-recommended counterparts (PeopleForce and HR Acuity).

The lower-authority sites have self-promoting listicles used as citations in the response, but are not recommended brands in the answer.

In this case, Paylocity is the one exception to the rule - it has a competitive Domain Rating and overall backlink count, but Google didn’t include it in the recommendation.

For "Best CRM for Small Business," the only self-promoting listicle whose brand was also recommended is Monday, which has a Domain Rating in the 90s and 75K referring domains. 4 out of the 5 cited but not recommended listicle brands have substantially lower referring domains and domain ratings.

For "Best CRM Software," recommended brands like HubSpot, Salesforce, and Zoho CRM show far higher referring domains, plus AI Overview and ChatGPT brand mentions. Kylas - a site cited with a self-promotional listicle in the answer, but not recommended in the response - trails on every metric with 0 AI Overview or ChatGPT mentions, and far fewer referring domains than competitors.

¹ Lives on a parent-company domain, so DR/ref domains reflect the whole company, not the product

For "Best SEO software," the two cited brands recommending themselves fall far below their recommended competitors across all metrics.

¹ Lives on a parent-company domain, so DR/ref domains reflect the whole company, not the product

The pattern is the same for all the queries I checked: lesser-known, less authoritative brands using self-promotional listicles to recommend their own brand tend to be cited as sources to help form the response, but left out of the recommendation compared to their higher-authority, better-known counterparts.

Consequence #3: Embarrassing Disclaimers in AI Overviews (and other LLMs)

Google also appears to be adding some new disclaimers to AI Overviews for certain queries where these listicles tend to be prevalent. For example, when asking about the "real best SEO experts," Google AI Overviews recently warned me that our industry is "saturated with self-proclaimed experts." It provides guidance on better ways of evaluating professionals:

This answer to a similar question also included a mention of "self-proclaimed gurus" before recommending "top industry professionals recognized for actual, measurable results and actionable search strategies":

Google also includes a note about using Clutch at the end of the AI Overview. I believe that Google knows it's difficult to get AI Overview answers right for these types of queries, and has begun including this additional context at the end of AI Overviews to better guide the user.

Other LLMs are doing similar things. For example, when you ask Claude about the best SEO experts, it often provides this warning, flagging that the entire category has been spammed:

Which Sites Get the Most Citations for "Best" Queries?

Another interesting trend is how heavily Google leans on a handful of high-authority review & UGC sites to generate AI responses for queries containing "best." Forbes, Reddit, and YouTube are frequently cited in AI Overview responses for "best" queries, and increasingly so over time. The sites below are the most cited domains for prompts including the word "best," according to Ahrefs Brand Radar:

Reddit, in particular, has grown substantially in citations for prompts containing "best" in recent months:

Forbes Advisor has also seen a surge in citations for "best" queries in AI Overviews since March:

The Takeaway

Put it all together and the takeaway is pretty clear. The self-promotional listicle did its job for a couple of years because it exploited a content void and because language models don't (yet?) have sophisticated systems to filter out self-promotion from genuine authority and truthfulness.

But it appears that Google has at least started to take steps to decouple what it will cite as a source from who it will actually recommend in its AI answers, and that second decision is now anchored to how much of the web is talking about you and recommending you, not how many times you've called yourself the best.