Florian S. Kluge

Cited voice

Lily Ray

Lily Ray is not affiliated with this site and has not written, reviewed or endorsed anything on it.

Lily Ray is an SEO and AI search consultant whose work focuses on E-E-A-T, content quality, algorithm update recovery and AI search. She founded the consultancy Algorythmic and serves as VP, SEO & AI Search at Amsive, and publishes her research on her Substack.

Cited in

  1. Your "best X" list still ranks. Google's AI may have dropped it

    Rankings held, clicks held, and most of the lists still lost most of their visibility in Google's AI answers. Here's how to check yours.

    Three empty light blue pedestals in front of an arched doorway on a peach wall.

Her research on self-promotional lists, 2026

Through 2026, Lily has kept returning to one tactic: "best X" lists on a company's own blog that rank its own product first.

  • February 3: she showed SaaS companies whose organic Google visibility fell sharply from mid-January 2026, by as much as 49% for one $8B B2B brand. The seven sites she walked through had 10 to 340 self-promotional lists each. She called the lists "a major likely culprit worth considering", while noting that the sites used other risky tactics too.
  • February 17: she checked 11 subfolders on sites hit by that unconfirmed January update. All 11 lost both organic traffic and AI search citations between January 20 and February 16. On Ahrefs estimates, organic traffic fell 26.7% on average and total AI citations 22.5%. Her conclusion: "the fastest way to lose visibility in AI search might be to lose it in Google first."
  • June 17: she separated being cited from being recommended. Across 100 B2B "best [category] software" queries, checked in April, May and June (80 of them showed an AI Overview), a brand whose own list was cited was left out of the recommendation 69% of the time (224 of 323 cited lists). The picks tended to go to established category leaders that many third-party pages recommend, often the competitors the self-promoters had listed. Established brands may still get cited and recommended from their own lists.
  • October 4: her update on 100 "best B2B software" queries for September 2026. Compared to June, AI Overviews cited 38% fewer self-promotional lists and left the publishing brand out of the recommendation 83% of the time, up from 69%.