Large language models (LLMs) excel at synthesizing enormous amounts of information into personalized responses to plain-language prompts. These responses draw on massive training datasets and are often enhanced with internet searches. The fastest way to influence what LLMs say about your brand is to influence the content they retrieve through those searches.
At Evertune Research, we use the Evertune AI marketing platform to track hundreds of brands across 250 categories across every major LLM. This gives us clear insight into which content AI models cite most often, especially when users ask for brand or product recommendations across industries.
For this analysis, we reviewed the 6,000 most-cited URLs per model across ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, Google AI Mode, Google AI Overview, and Perplexity for March and April. We found that these models share a key behavior: they heavily cite listicles.
Half of LLMs’ most-cited URLs are listicles
Of the roughly 25,000 unique URLs we reviewed, half were listicles. Across nearly 400 million citations from all models, 63% pointed to listicles.
Listicles have many qualities that make them ideal for models’ consumption.
- They’re tightly focused on a single topic, like “best laptops for gamers,” which makes them highly relevant to user prompts.
- Their structured format also makes the content easy for models to parse and reproduce.
- For brand-related queries, listicles do much of the work for LLMs by comparing products head-to-head on features, price, materials, and more—a format ChatGPT now features prominently in its shopping widget.
Listicles were pervasive across every model we reviewed. They accounted for 40–65% of the most-cited URLs, with Copilot at the low end and Gemini at the high end.
The vast majority of listicles in our analysis featured ranked lists, such as “Top 5 CRM Tools.” Depending on the model, these made up 71% to 86% of listicles. Unranked lists, such as “7 Ways to Save on Groceries,” were a distant second. Institutional rankings (e.g., data-heavy lists like U.S. News & World Report’s Best Colleges rankings) accounted for just 1.4% to 4.7% of listicles.
Corporate, earned media, and affiliate domains were the top sources of listicles in our analysis. It’s worth noting, however, that individual pages may contain affiliate content even when the broader domain does not.
- For example, Forbes.com is an earned media domain, but it includes affiliate segments such as Forbes Advisor and Forbes Vetted. It ranked among the top three sources on every model for listicles in our URL dataset.
A word of warning before making listicles the foundation of a GEO strategy: Google has already signaled its intent to crack down on promotional listicles. Simply ranking your own brand No. 1 alongside competitors could also run afoul of a Federal Trade Commission rule that “prohibits a business from misrepresenting that a website…
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