Google's AI Is Quoting Your 'Best' List — Then Recommending Your Competitors 69% of the Time
A new study finds Google AI Overviews cite brands' own listicles but leave them out of the recommendation 69% of the time. Here's how to fix it.
Fazly Rabby Bhuiyan
Webry Technologies
When 'Best Of' Backfires
Publishing a "best [your category] software" page that conveniently ranks you at #1 used to be a reliable SEO play. In the age of AI search, it can now backfire badly: Google's AI Overviews will happily cite that page as a source — and then recommend your competitors instead. A new analysis by SEO researcher Lily Ray puts a number on it: that happens roughly 69% of the time.
What Happened
Ray analyzed 100 B2B "best [category] software" queries in Google AI Overviews across three dates — April 15, May 15, and June 8 — using Ahrefs Brand Radar to capture the AI Overview answer text and the sources it cited, according to Search Engine Land.
The pattern was consistent. Self-promotional listicles were cited 323 times. In 224 of those cases, Google cited a brand's own page but did not recommend that brand — about 69% of the time. In one example, for "best LMS for selling courses," Google cited Oasis LMS as a source but recommended Kajabi, Thinkific, LearnWorlds, and Teachable instead.
Ray also found that Forbes, Reddit, and YouTube were among the most-cited domains for "best" queries, and that organic visibility declines for listicle-heavy sites began around January 20 and accelerated during Google's May 2026 core update.
Why It Matters
This flips a core assumption of old-school content marketing. AI Overviews don't reward you for claiming you're the best — they cross-reference what third parties say about you. Brands that already led their categories, were widely mentioned by independent sources, and had stronger link profiles were the ones that actually got recommended. A self-published ranking is treated as a useful list, not as evidence about you.
So a page can be "winning" by every legacy SEO metric — getting cited, getting impressions — while quietly funneling buyers to the exact competitors it was meant to beat.
What This Means for Businesses Betting on AI Visibility
If your visibility strategy still ends at "rank our own content," AI search has already moved past you. The work now is answer engine optimization (AEO): making sure the entities, reviews, and third-party mentions that AI models actually trust point to you, not just your own marketing copy.
That means auditing how ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews currently describe and recommend you, finding the gaps where competitors are being surfaced in your place, and building the off-site authority — independent mentions, structured data, credible citations — that earns the recommendation, not just the citation. This is exactly the kind of AI SEO/AEO audit work an AI-first agency should be running before a single new page goes live.
"Self-promotional listicles were cited 323 times; in 224 of those cases Google cited a brand's own page without recommending it." — analysis by Lily Ray, reported by Search Engine Land
The Bottom Line
Calling yourself "the best" no longer convinces the systems that decide who gets recommended — it may even hand the win to a competitor. The brands that show up in AI answers in the second half of 2026 will be the ones who engineered their reputation across the web, not just their own homepage. If you don't know what Google's AI says about you today, that's the first audit to run.
Sources
Search Engine Land — searchengineland.com/google-ai-overviews-cite-self-serving-listicles-recommend-competitors-480573
Lily Ray — lilyraynyc.substack.com/p/why-calling-yourself-the-best-could