Scrunch: self-promoting listicles boost AI brand recommendations
What this answers
- Does publishing your own best-of list help a brand get recommended by AI?
- Modestly, per Scrunch: citing a brand's self-published listicle lifted its AI recommendation rate from about 4% to 7% across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity, AI Overviews and AI Mode, based on nearly 10,000 AI-cited URLs sampled May–June 2026.
- Can naming a rival in your own best-of list get that rival recommended instead?
- Sometimes — Scrunch found a competitor got recommended in 24.3% of answers citing a self-promoting list, though the effect only held up in testing when a lower-visibility brand named lower-visibility rivals.
Brands that publish their own “best of” or comparison listicles, and get those pages cited by AI assistants, see their recommendation rate rise from about 4% to roughly 7%, per a Scrunch analysis of nearly 10,000 AI-cited URLs across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode. Citing a brand’s listicle also roughly doubled how often AI answers named that brand outright — about 39% of the time versus 19% when the listicle wasn’t cited — though Scrunch says only the recommendation-rate figure survived a falsification test it ran on the data. In 63.9% of answers that cited a listicle, the AI recommended no brand at all, and a self-promoting list only lost ground to a competitor’s recommendation, in testing, when a lower-visibility brand named lower-visibility rivals.
Why it matters: The lift is real but small and the riskier finding — that naming a rival can occasionally hand it the recommendation — means a self-published best-of list is not a free AEO win.
Glossary: AI OverviewsAI Mode
Via PPC Land ↗
Posted to the wire September 25, 2026. Edited by Joe Balewski.