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Do Self-promoting Listicles Still Work in Mid-2026?

A deep dive into the good and the bad from listicles in our own client base.

Wes Flippo

Founder and CEO of BFD

Brand visibility

TL;DR

  • Self-promoting listicles are causing issues in Google performance, but still seem to have value in ChatGPT and other LLMs
  • These listicles can also still rank in Google, and the risk comes from doing this at scale
    • Having a couple of these, done correctly, doesn’t seem to be an issue just yet
  • Be cautious with self-promoting listicles right now, as we may see further downwind issues from these over time

Self-promoting listicles have been recommended by basically every GEO / SEO agency out there for a while now (except maybe Wil Reynolds and the Seer team — props to them). They are, of course, also highly controversial.

That being said, there’s a lot of research that has come out recently that suggests these might actually be hurting organic performance and helping your competitors win in AI search. Both Ahrefs and Lily Ray have recently released studies of their own documenting exactly how. Both are great reads and we recommend each of them.

We have 2 B2B clients in unrelated industries that are far from industry leaders (they are small, boutique companies), but dominate in AI visibility for the prompts we are targeting. Both of these have self-promoting listicles present on their sites but have vastly different situations.

Client #1 was clearly impacted by the Google algorithm update in January 2026. Non-brand visibility tanked, and traffic is down -90% from peak.

Google Search Console performance chart for Client #1 covering July 2025 to July 2026: 23.2K total clicks, 6.77M impressions, 0.3% CTR and an average position of 24.3. Both the clicks and impressions lines collapse sharply in January 2026 and stay flat at the bottom of the chart for the rest of the period.
Client #1 in Google Search Console — clicks and impressions fall off a cliff in January 2026 and never recover.

They were clearly algorithmically penalized, and after digging in, we found that they had 15+ self-promoting listicles targeting different long-tail variations of their target keywords.

As Lily Ray pointed out, “Google has started pushing back, and the first sign was in organic search earlier this year.” Their timeline aligns perfectly with what other sites using these listicles saw: a massive drop in visibility and traffic.

These pages were driving high-quality, high value leads for the client. These disappeared overnight, along with the rest of their organic traffic. After a couple of months, they needed professional help to rectify this, and we took on the task.

While it’s a bummer that they lost their organic traffic and visibility, they did retain their strong positioning in AI search (client is the red line).

PromptWatch brand visibility line chart from 3 June to 19 July, with period-over-period comparison enabled. The client’s red line runs along the top of the chart between roughly 18% and 24%, clear of a cluster of competitor lines sitting between 0% and 15%.
Client #1’s AI visibility (red) held up across models even as Google traffic collapsed.

And just looking at ChatGPT, they are also winning by a large margin (red again). As they are in a high ticket, high competition B2B niche industry, this is a huge win and produces legitimate opportunities for them. These are brand mentions and visibility vs. just purely citations.

PromptWatch brand visibility bar chart for ChatGPT comparing seven brands. The client’s red bar is the tallest at roughly 23%, more than double the next competitor at about 10.5%, with the remaining brands between 1.5% and 9%.
In ChatGPT alone, Client #1 (red) leads the next competitor by more than 2x on brand visibility.

These listicles are being cited, and increasing visibility for the client, yet simultaneously are potentially causing issues in Google search. Quite a conundrum.

Citations table with the Type column highlighted, listing the client’s most-cited pages across ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Mode. Rows typed “Listicle” sit near the top of the list with 31, 27, 14, 13, 12 and 8 citations, mixed in among landing pages and other page types.
The same listicles Google appears to be penalising are among the client’s most-cited pages in AI search.

It’s important to note that this example (and the next one we’ll show below) have many other pages outside of these listicles that are producing citations and mentions. It’s not just the self-promoting listicles that are working, the rest of the work is also enhancing visibility in AI search for this client.

So, what’s the right strategy on these? There’s no perfect answer, but we’ve decided to block these URLs from being indexed only on Googlebot for now.

If we chose to blanket noindex them, Bing would also follow this directive. As there is high speculation that ChatGPT uses Bing search we wanted to be careful on removing these from Bing as well (and we’re not seeing the same catastrophic drop in performance in Bing).

Because these listicles have such strong visibility in ChatGPT, blocking them in GPTBot would absolutely have an impact on performance.

Client #2 is a long-standing client of ours, and while they are much smaller than their competition, they dominate in AI search as well.

Unlike Client #1, they have not had any issues in Google, and their self-promoting listicles are holding steady in terms of clicks:

Google Search Console performance chart for Client #2 covering July 2025 to July 2026: 168 total clicks, 63.1K impressions, 0.3% CTR and an average position of 13.3. Impressions begin around September 2025 and climb steadily through 2026, with no drop in January.
Client #2’s self-promoting listicles — clicks holding steady, with none of the January collapse.

Also unlike Client #1, they only have 2 of these articles on the site, vs. 15+. A number of our other clients have just a couple of self-promoting listicles and have no issues, so it really does seem like the danger comes from scale.

It’s truly fascinating in general that Google is even ranking these as well as they do in a lot of cases.

Siege Media still ranks extremely well for all kinds of high-value SEO agency terms in Google using these (and they’re doing them at scale), which is mind blowing when you really think about it.

Semrush domain overview for siegemedia.com showing 14.4K organic keywords (up 5.01%), 18.2K monthly organic traffic (down 2.84%) and $181.6K in traffic cost (down 4.42%), above a two-year estimated traffic trend that holds between roughly 15K and 25K visits with one spike near 57K in spring 2026.
Siege Media’s organic footprint, built at scale on the same tactic.
Semrush organic keywords table for siegemedia.com. “wordpress seo services” ranks 2nd, “wordpress seo agency” 1st, “enterprise seo agency” 3rd, “technical seo agency” 3rd, “b2b digital marketing agency” 4th and “shopify seo agency” 4th — each pointing at a best-agencies or agency-comparison URL on their own site.
Top-four Google rankings for high-value agency terms, all landing on self-promoting listicles.

Client #2 is also generating strong visibility and recommendations from these, but also from the rest of their GEO strategy.

PromptWatch brand visibility bar chart with period-over-period comparison enabled. Paired bars ascend from left to right; the tallest pair on the right rises from about 33% in the previous period to roughly 39% in the current one, well ahead of the next brand at about 22%.
Client #2’s brand visibility, up period over period and clear of the field.
Citations table for Client #2 broken down by page type. A corporate product page leads with 128 citations at an average position of #4.9, followed by listicles with 85, 78 and 55 citations, another product page with 58, and a how-to page with 33.
Client #2’s citations are spread across product pages, listicles and how-tos — not listicles alone.

So, self-promoting articles do still work, and not just in AI search, but even in traditional Google search.

For now, we’re being cautious with this tactic, and definitely having any clients who have scaled these pull back. While these are still effective, it seems like it’s only a matter of time before we see further adjustments to how these are treated in Google and in AI search across the board. How long will that take? Your guess is as good as mine.