There is a page on the internet right now, written by someone you have never met, that is doing more for your competitor's business than their entire website.
It is a list. "Best commercial electricians on the Central Coast." "Top 10 branding agencies in Australia." "The 7 best suppliers for X."
Your competitor is number one on it. You are not on it at all.
Ranking first in a third party listicle lifted brand visibility in AI answers by up to 16.5 percentage points in some categories. That figure comes from Peec AI's study of nearly 200,000 AI responses, and the biggest lift was in B2B software. For a single placement on someone else's page, that is a big swing.
So the answer to "do listicles still matter for SEO?" is yes, more than ever, just not the way they used to. The lists that count now are the ones other people publish about your category, because those are the pages AI assistants read when someone asks who to hire. Your job is to get onto them.
Why AI assistants love a ranked list
Think about what an assistant is trying to do when someone asks for a recommendation. It needs to produce a small, ordered set of options with reasons attached, and it needs to be reasonably confident it is not making things up.
A listicle hands it exactly that, pre assembled. Names, ranking, and a sentence of justification for each, written by an apparently independent third party.
It is the single most convenient format on the internet for the job these systems are doing, which is why they lean on it so heavily.
Your website argues that you are good. A list asserts that you are third best. To a machine looking for corroboration, the second one is worth far more.
The other advantage is structural. Lists are easy to parse, consistently formatted and full of entity names sitting next to descriptions. Everything about them is designed for extraction, accidentally.
This is one piece of a bigger shift in how businesses get found. If you want the full picture, our playbook for getting cited by ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity covers the rest. Listicles are the fastest lever in it.
Why your own website is not enough
Most owners respond to AI search by publishing more on their own site. More blog posts, more service pages, more keywords. Some of that helps. But it runs into a hard ceiling.
Everything on your own domain is, by definition, self promotion. An assistant can use it to understand what you do. It is far less willing to use it as evidence that you are good at it. For that, it looks for other people saying so.
That is also why ranking first on Google no longer guarantees you a place in the answer. The assistant is not just reading the top result. It is looking for agreement across several independent sources, and a ranked list is agreement in its most compact form.
Think of it as the difference between a CV and a reference. You need both. Most businesses have spent years polishing the CV and have never asked anyone for a reference.
Finding the lists that matter
Start with an hour of searching, done properly.
Search "best [your category] [your city]", "top [your category] Australia", "[your category] companies compared" and every variant a buyer might use. Note every third party article that appears, especially the ones ranking on page one.
Then ask the assistants the same questions and note which sources they cite. Those are your priority targets, because you have direct evidence a model is reading them.
Build a simple sheet. Publication, article, who is currently listed, who wrote it, contact details.
Twenty rows is plenty. This is a targeted campaign, not a mass mailout.
Run the search in this order so nothing slips through:
- Google, with location. "Best [category] near [suburb]" and "top [category] [city]". Look past the ads and the map pack to the articles.
- Google, with year. Add the current year to each query. Publishers title their lists that way to look fresh, and those are the lists being actively maintained.
- The assistants. Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini "who are the best [category] in [city]?" and open every source they link.
- Industry and local media. Trade publications, local news sites and council or chamber of commerce directories often publish curated lists that never rank well but still get read.
How to actually get included
Most business owners find this uncomfortable and assume it requires payment or luck. It usually requires neither, because these publishers have a problem you can solve.
A "best of" list with four entries is a weak article. They want more good options, they want the article to stay current, and they generally do not want to do the research.
So make it effortless for them.
- Send a complete entry, not a request. Business name, one sentence description, three specific differentiators, service area, credentials, a high quality photo and a link. Written in the same style as their existing entries.
- Give them a reason you belong. A specialisation nobody else on the list has. A credential. A number. Publishers want the list to look thorough, and a genuinely distinct entry improves their article.
- Offer a customer they can contact. Verification is the thing they are least willing to do and most reassured by.
- Follow up once, politely, after two weeks. Then move on. A small batch of well targeted emails can land an inclusion or two.
- Watch for outdated lists. An article listing a business that closed in 2023 is an article the publisher would quite like to update. Point it out helpfully and offer the replacement.
Keep the email short. Three sentences is enough. Who you are, why the list would be stronger with you on it, and the finished entry pasted below, ready to drop in. The less editing they have to do, the more likely it goes live.
Build your own, honestly
There is a second play here and it works better than it should.
Publish your own comparison content, including competitors, honestly. "The five best options for X in our region, including us, and when to choose each one."
Two things happen. Buyers trust you enormously for it, because nobody expects a business to name a competitor as the better choice for a certain job. And assistants treat comparison content as high value source material, especially when it is specific and even handed.
The fear is that you will send customers away. In practice you will send away the ones who were never right for you, and close a far higher percentage of the rest, because you have just demonstrated that you tell the truth when it costs you something.
A comparison page that gets used as source material has a few things in common:
- A clear "best for" line on every entry. "Best for large commercial fit outs." "Best for tight budgets." Assistants love a sentence that maps a business to a situation.
- Facts, not adjectives. Service area, specialisation, typical project size, how long they have operated. Things a reader could check.
- Your own entry written with the same restraint. If yours is the only one full of superlatives, the whole page loses credibility.
- A visible date. Update it at least twice a year and say so on the page.
What good placement looks like
Not all inclusions are equal. Prioritise in this order.
Articles the assistants already cite, which you identified in your audit. Publications with genuine independence and editorial standards. Lists that get updated. Then everything else.
Be careful with the pay to play directories that will list anyone for a fee. They are cheap, they are easy, and they carry very little weight precisely because they are indiscriminate. A model can tell the difference between an editorial list and an advertisement, and so can your customer.
Position matters too, but less than presence. Being fourth on a list that assistants read beats being first on a list nobody reads. Get on first. Work your way up by being the entry that gets updated with fresh proof.
Keeping the placement alive
An inclusion is not a one off win. Lists go stale, get rewritten, and quietly drop businesses that stopped responding.
Diarise a check every six months. Confirm your entry is still there, still accurate, and still says what you want it to say. If the article has been updated and you have been dropped, ask why, politely, and offer refreshed material.
Send the publisher something useful once or twice a year without asking for anything. A new credential, a notable project, a data point from your own work. Publishers remember the businesses that make their job easier, and those are the businesses that survive the next rewrite.
Lists and reviews also reinforce each other. A publisher deciding who to keep will often check your reviews first, and assistants weigh both. We covered why AI reads your reviews before it recommends you. Keep that side healthy too.
The month of work
Hour one, find the lists. Hours two and three, write your standard entry properly. Hours four and five, send twenty personalised emails. Then follow up in a fortnight.
Two or three inclusions from that effort will do more for how often your business gets named in an AI answer than anything else you could do with the same five hours.
Here is how that might play out. Say you run a landscape design business in Newcastle. Your hour of searching turns up eleven "best landscapers" articles and four more that ChatGPT cites when asked. You write one entry with your specialisation in native, low water gardens, a photo of a finished job and a past client happy to take a call. You email fifteen publishers and follow up with the ones who stay quiet. Whatever lands, you now have a baseline to measure against: ask the same assistant questions again in six weeks and note whether your name starts appearing.
That is the whole method. Unglamorous, cheap, and mostly ignored by your competitors. If you would rather hand it to someone who does this every week, it sits inside our digital marketing work alongside SEO and AI search.
Your competitor is number one on a list somewhere. Go and get on it.
Frequently asked questions
Do listicles help with AI search visibility?
Yes. Third party "best of" lists give AI assistants a ready made, ranked set of options with reasons attached, written by someone other than the business. That is exactly what an assistant needs to recommend with confidence. Being included on lists that assistants already cite is one of the fastest ways to start appearing in AI answers for your category.
How do I get my business added to a "best of" list?
Find the lists that rank on Google and the ones AI assistants cite, then email the author with a complete, ready to publish entry. Include a one sentence description, three specific differentiators, your service area, credentials, a good photo and a customer they can contact. Follow up once after two weeks, then move on to the next publisher.
Should I pay to be listed in online directories?
Be cautious. Pay to play directories that list anyone for a fee carry little weight with buyers or AI systems, because they are indiscriminate. Editorial lists with genuine independence, regular updates and real selection criteria are worth far more. If a listing is only available for payment, treat it as advertising and judge it on the traffic it sends, not on reputation.
Is it a bad idea to mention competitors on my own website?
Usually not. An honest comparison page that names competitors and says when each is the better choice builds trust with buyers and is treated as useful source material by AI assistants. You may send away a few people who were never a good fit, but you tend to close more of the rest because you have shown you tell the truth.