- 4 days ago
- 6 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
Listicles might be the most loved, and most hated, content type on the internet.
On one hand, listicles are everywhere—SaaS blogs, travel websites, shopping roundups, LLM citations—and they’ve become part of many generative engine optimization strategies.
On the other, there's some backlash, by both search engines and search marketers, against low-quality, self-promotional content that’s giving the entire format a bad name.
Both can be true. It’s worth understanding that tension before you write the listicle off; or, on the flip side, bet your entire content strategy on it.
What’s a listicle?
First, a quick definition so we’re on the same page: A listicle is an article structured as a numbered or bulleted list. The name is a portmanteau of "list" and "article." For example, The 14 best tools to track brand visibility in AI search and Wix features that supercharge your AI search strategy. Yes, those are stories from this publication.
There’s typically a short explanation for each item, and readers can scan through the subheadings to find the ones they’re most interested in. While some listicles are clickbait, readers usually know exactly what they're getting before they open the page. You want the best project management tools under $50 a month? Great, that’s what you’re going to get.
A brief history of the listicle
Search marketers have been talking a lot about listicles lately (I’ll get to that), but they didn’t invent them.
To truly understand the origin of the listicle, you need to look at the slideshow. Popular in the early 2010s, slideshows were essentially listicles with each item on its own slide.
I might have produced hundreds of slideshows in my early years as a digital editor at magazines now owned by Hearst and People Inc. Think: The 10 Best Foods That Fight Inflammation, Best Day Creams for Adult Acne, 15 Core Exercises for Pregnancy. These slideshows were reported. They were loaded with expertise. And I like to think they were helpful to readers.
Still, there were problems with the slideshow. It was a desktop-era format built around page views. Each slide was a separate page load, which inflated traffic numbers and served more ad impressions. When mobile took over, slideshows became a nightmare to navigate on small screens. No one misses the slideshow.
But slideshows set the stage for listicles the way Myspace set the stage for Instagram, or the way Christina Aguilera paved the way for Sabrina Carpenter.
In the mid-2010s, listicles—basically single-page slideshows—became the go-to content type for publishers, most notably Buzzfeed, which built an empire based on scannable lists people shared all over Facebook. Things like: 47 Cat Videos That Are Basically You on a Monday Morning and 17 Things You Miss About Your Small Town That You'll Never Admit Out Loud. (A former Buzzfeed editor once told me that “weird” numbers performed well.) There’s even a listicle of Buzzfeed listicles.
To this day, if I’m searching for the best hotels in Paris or the best running shoes for marathons, I prefer to consume this information in an easy-to-read ranked list.
"We, as humans, oftentimes think in lists. When you go to the grocery store, what do you bring with you? A grocery list." - Ross Simmonds, founder and CEO of Foundation Marketing, in his SEO Week talk
This, in part, explains why listicles are still alive and well in publishing. A decade later, I still produce lists for mainstream publications, like The Wall Street Journal’s Best Places to Visit feature.
Why listicles are catnip for AI search marketers
Marketers like listicles for the same reason publishers like listicles: they work.
Listicles became a reliable SEO format because they're scannable, keyword-friendly, and built for the kind of "best of" queries that drive commercial traffic.
When AI search emerged as an avenue for brand visibility, listicles offered another lever for marketers. "LLMs tend to give us lists back," Simmonds said in his talk.
As SEO consultant Amanda Milligan said in this piece on how to get media coverage, “LLMs see these [best-of lists] and they’re like, ‘great, somebody did my job for me,’ and take those answers.”
We recently published research in partnership with PeecAI, based on an analysis of over a million citations retrieved from ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, and Perplexity to learn which content types are most cited by LLMs. It found that…
Listicles make up 21.9% of citations across all intents and verticals
40% of commercial queries cite listicles, nearly double other intents
This is in line with Profound research presented at brightonSEO in September 2025, which shows that listicles and comparative content accounted for 25% of citations.
The listicle backlash
We can’t have nice things in SEO. It’s like some people saw the efficacy of listicles, heard they were good for AI search, and said, how can I manipulate this format in the worst way possible?
So now we have companies creating fake review sites they secretly control, pay-to-play lists pretending to be editorial, and AI-generated roundups with no human ever having tested the products.
As Lily Ray, founder of Algorythmic and VP of SEO & AI Search at Amsive, recently shared on Linkedin, some of the worst listicles go beyond “sketchy” and actually break the law.
“A few years back, a company was sued for publishing hundreds of fake ‘best of’ review pages that ranked their own services number one, included fabricated reviews of competitors whose products had never been used, and posted fake reviews on third-party platforms.” - Lily Ray
That might be an extreme example, but untrustworthy listicles are enough of a problem for Google to crack down on them, per an analysis by Lily Ray that showed a loss in organic visibility for listicle-heavy sites following the December 2025 Core Update.
Similarly, AI search agency Seer Interactive reported that ChatGPT listicle citations decreased 30% between December 2025 and January 2026.
In defense of the listicle
As I see it, the listicle itself isn't the problem—the content of the listicle is the problem. That’s why people are calling out self-promotional listicles in particular.
Apply the same logic to other content formats: There are good articles and bad articles. Valuable emails and phishing emails. Unbiased research and shoddy research. Yet no one calls for a moratorium on articles, we aren’t deactivating our email accounts, and no one says “stop all research!”
A crucial finding in our report with PeecAI was that there is a distinction between listicles on trusted third-party sites and self-promotional listicles.
In other words: Not all listicles are the same.
Self-promotional listicles vs. third-party listicles
Tom Wells, who authored the report, took a deeper look at the professional services industry, where the listicle citation rate was the highest, and calculated the percentage of self-promotional listicles compared to third-party listicles.
Self-promotional listicles made up 19.1% of citations, while third-party listicles made up 80.9% of listicle citations.
That’s a huge difference, and it points to listicles still being effective—if LLMs can trust them.
Self-promotional listicles are those which are published on a website’s domain and refer to themselves on the top of a list. While these pieces are still cited by AI search, and may perform on Google for some time, many search professionals are wary of leaning too heavily into this tactic because of the obvious bias. Still, the most trustworthy brands present their competitors in an honest light.
Third-party listicles are the kind produced by editorial publications, Yelp, and influencer blogs. Some of these listicles have active affiliate programs, but this should be declared clearly on the site. Truly earned placements, like editorial product reviews, serve as proof that a product is worth buying.
So, should you publish more listicles to show up in AI search?
First, it’s worth noting that third-party listicles are a different game. They carry more weight because they’re inherently less biased: you earn your placement in them, and marketers don’t control the output or the message. That’s the exact thing that makes them more trustworthy. We cover this topic deeper in Why is digital PR so important in AI search?
As for your owned content, I could publish a—*grimaces slightly*—listicle of tips to help you publish more trustworthy lists. But I think it’s more important that we start seeing the forest through the trees.
You know when you’re not really serving your audience. You don’t need a tool, an AI prompt, or an algorithm to tell you that. You know. Your audience knows. Eventually, search platforms catch on, too.
That’s the kind of thing we lose sight of too often in SEO. We all want a fix, a hack, a clearly defined path. But when considering how self-published listicles play into your own content strategy, I think it’s most helpful to take a step back and ask yourself:
Is this content genuinely helpful?
Am I being fair to my competitors?
Am I providing value to my audience?
Do they honestly reflect the current products? (Are they up to date?)
Ultimately, listicles aren’t a golden ticket to AI search visibility. But they aren’t inherently wrong, either. In magazine publishing, we call the approach and format of an article the “packaging,” as in, the vessel your content is contained in. So then, the only relevant question becomes: what’s in the package?
