Scrunch: self-promoting listicles boost AI brand recommendations

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.