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 ” 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 firsthand 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…
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