Google Is Firing Shots: Self-Promotional Listicles Are Getting Wiped Out

0:00Shots have been fired by Google. Ladies and gentlemen, if you are squeamish, you might not want to listen to this one because it could get uncomfortable. This was shared by Glen Gabe on X. Yes, it's happening. With the latest volatility, Lily Ray saw a bunch of sites dropping, but it was their blog content dropping heavily. And when digging into that, there were selfserving listicles all over the place. If you don't know what that is, I made an episode about it. 885

0:27of this show. The SEO hack LLM's love. How self-promotional best X lists dominate Chachi PT. So you make a best X for Y list, the best shoes for running list, and you are a shoe company and you put yourself first. That is a self-promotional listicle. So Glen Gabe says, "Blog content dropping heavily when digging into that. There were self-serving listicles all over the place. I have seen the same thing and have been digging in heavily with the latest volatility we have seen. Lily does a great job breaking everything down. And to me, I'm glad this is finally happening. Like I have explained before, it was super embarrassing for

1:02the sites publishing those self-serving listicles. We knew Google would crack down on that at some point. And it is all over the place that you see this that people are writing these listicles for their niche, putting themselves number one. It is all over the place and Google is taking hardcore action. Glenn continues, "By the way, I feel like this could be a review system update and could be based on the self-serving listical crap flooding Google's index and ranking in AI overviews, AI mode, etc." And of course, any AI search platform leveraging Google's results would be impacted downstream. This is big news. I would read Lily's posts and

1:38then start digging into the movement. So, I'm going to share the most hard-hitting passages from Lily's post and it is a great post. It will be linked to in the description for this episode. Lily posted, "Is Google finally cracking down on self-promotional listicles?" Here it goes. Based on the type of content I saw most heavily impacted, it seems possible this volatility reflects ongoing refinements to Google's review system, which has increasingly focused on detecting selfserving, biased, or low evidence review content. In most cases, I also observed that the blog was the primary driver of the visibility decline, accounting for the largest share of the losses or a similar content hub

2:19containing articles or resources. Top ofunnel content getting further hit. The visibility chart below shows an example of a well-known 8 billion B2B brand that saw its organic visibility drop by a whopping 49% between January 21st and February 2nd, 2026. Shares this crazy graph and says the company's blog makes up 77% of the site's visibility and it shows a massive visibility decline since mid January 2026. Other subfolders and subdomains on the site showed much smaller declines or even visibility gains during the same time period. I dug through the blog articles to look for common patterns employed by sites negatively impacted by algorithm updates and did see some of

3:07the common culprits. Highly similar programmatic content templates, excessiveformational content targeting various who, what, when search terms, and overuse of 2026 across titles. despite the year being only 4 weeks underway. So, for example, you say the best running shoes in 2026, like something like that. The best CRM for logistics in 2026. But something else stood out. All right, this is this is where it starts getting real scary. The blog contained dozens of self-promotional listicles, 191 of them to be precise. By self-promoting listicles, I mean an article containing best where the company lists themselves as the number

3:49one best. You can easily detect this. This is very interesting. You can easily detect this with the following search operator on Google. So you use this, you replace the site with whatever you want to try. So it's like site company.com/blog in title colon best quotes.co company. So let's say it was Nike, you would do nike.com/blog in title best one and then Nike. And then you would see if Nike is putting themselves number one. And this is where this is where it starts getting even crazier just the amount that some companies are doing this. So Lily says, "I must point out that this company's blog has around 30,000 articles indexed

4:32on Google." And they so they have 191 of these self-promotional listicles, but they have 30,000 articles indexed on Google. So lots of people would say 191 is a drop in the bucket. But Lily makes the very reasonable argument, producing 191 self-promotionalistical articles feels more like an intentional strategy than an accident. And I personally will strongly agree with that. She says, "Here's another example of a SAS company that was hit hard beginning around January 19th. The site dropped in overall Google organic search visibility by 43% since the recent ranking volatility began. Approximately around 85% of the site's organic visibility stems from its forward/guide folder, which saw the most

5:19significant visibility drop. And then when you look through the guide subfolder, it shows dozens of educational articles related to the site's offerings about 2,780 indexed articles on Google. But looking again at whether the guide subfolder uses self-promotional best listicles where the company ranks itself number one, lo and behold, there are 228 such articles. And it's very easy for her to just do a search operator to see that 228 of these self-promotional best listicles. That is an aggressive strategy. And she shares so many more examples in this amazing article. So many more. This isn't just a few companies that are doing it. So I want to go now to this section of her

6:05article, common trends among affected sites. And it is interesting because there are other negative trends that these sites are doing. It's kind of funny how bad like they're trying to do SEO or geo generative engine optimization and it's just so lazy and it's like if you're doing this what do you expect to happen to me just like as somebody who has done SEO for well over a decade seeing this stuff come and go and it's like they think that they're outsmarting Google like what do you expect? All right this is what this is

6:37the common trends among affected sites. Lily says, "It's important to note that self-promotional listicles are only one tactic among many used by these sites in their content strategies alongside other approaches that may be perceived by Google as prioritizing SEO over helpful, reliable information that's created to benefit people. I I actually I want to just say why to me this is so funny and why I kind of like I'm kind of enjoying

7:02this a little bit. I'm not going to lie. And the reason for that is because you see on X and you see on LinkedIn and you see on YouTube, you see all these people shilling these very bad tactics that lots of web masters, lots of site owners or marketers are going to follow because they look flashy then and and they work for a little bit and you go, "Oh my god." They work for a little bit and you go, "Oh my god, this is it." You go way too hard because no one tells you to stop. No one tells you the downsides because you know what? the downsides

7:32don't do as well. The reasonable arguments don't get as many clicks. People don't want to read the reason the reasonable arguments. They want to be the ones who are outsmarting Google. And then people like me or other guests of this show like Har Preit or David Quaid are like stop don't do this or Lily Lily Ray like relax don't do this. Google hasn't caught on yet. They're probably going to catch on and then people just don't want to listen. So if you're listening to this episode, please and I'm I'm going to talk about how to avoid this a little bit uh later on. So Lily says here here are the common trends

8:08commonalities among sites. So she says all of these sites are in the software as a service space. That's very interesting. Which could suggest that they are likely to be paying close attention to the recent SEO/ge trends. Many of these sites had recently scaled content quickly, which could be an indication that they are using or overutilizing AI to quickly scale content, perhaps with insufficient human oversight. And then she drops several of these articles into originality.ai's detection tool. The CMO of originality.ai has been on this podcast and actually she's coming back on to share a very interesting case study soon. And Lily says, "All of these articles that were hit returned a 100%

8:50confident score that the text is AI generated. The blogs were using other tactics I have seen get sites in trouble with during Google's algorithm updates, like including recent dates when the article was not substantially updated." So, you're you're just basically changing the date published or the date updated when you didn't actually update anything. Schema.org Org violations such as misusing aggregate rating schema across ineligible pages, excessiveformational or definitionbased content, content that is overly salesy or strays from the main purpose of the site and heavy automation/programmatic templates scaled across hundreds or thousands of pages. And the nuance is it's also important to note this is from Lily. It's also important to note that I

9:35found examples of a few sites that saw heavy performance declines in their blogs, but were not overutilizing self-promotional listicles in their content. That said, they were using other tactics that could affect performance, often tied to review articles and other articles leveraging highly similar programmatic page templates. Self-promotional listicles may only tell one part of the story. But given that this approach was common among all the companies with the largest drops and other companies not included in this article, it looks to me like a major likely culprit worth considering when evaluating the overall quality of these blogs and resource centers. So here's what I want to wrap with and and

10:13this is kind of if you're worried that you are that maybe you might get in trouble with a Google algorithm update, this is what you need to keep in mind. So, number one, these self-promotional articles like it's gray hat. Don't get it twisted. That is gray hat. It's not totally black hat, but it is gray hat. Especially if you are not transparent about the fact that it's your site putting yourself number one, it's gray hat. Now, if you do it, my take is if you do it a very little bit, not even in the context of everything else on your site, just in general, if you do it a

10:48very little bit, it's probably going to be fine. But if you're putting out hundreds of these articles or even dozens of them, well, that is a very obvious tactic that you are doing, especially when the titles are all the same format. It's just so easy to detect. Oh my gosh, it's just all a similar pattern. Basically, the conclusion to draw is any white hat or gray hat tactic that is used way more than other white hat or gray hat tactics is spammy. anything anything that is just used way way more especially with a very clear pattern becomes spammy. So that could be targeting keyword variations where you do like where

11:31you're targeting keywords like let's just say like standing desk for offices and you and you just have like a million pages standing desks for every different scenario offices, preschools, hospitals and that's all the the pages that you are putting up and you're not doing anything. You're not doing any blog content. You're not targeting other variations of of keywords that that don't include like standing desks or something like that. This is only what

11:56you're doing. Okay, that is spammy. You're overusing something. Or you're only getting a certain type of backlink. You're only getting high domain authority sites. That's actually unnatural. That is spammy. Or you're overusing a subfolder structure. Maybe you're just putting a subfolder for everything and you really don't need to do that and you should condense subfolders. If you're overusing a subfolder structure and you're doing that like way more than other tactics, that can be spammy. If you're putting out way too many press releases when you are not putting out any content on your site, that can be spammy. If you are only getting exact match anchor text

12:29when you're doing link building, spammy. Using the same exact language across pages on way too many pages, that is spammy. Way too many internal links, that is spammy. Using your keyword way too much on the page, keyword stuffing, that is spammy. Personally, I think it's very obvious and I think a lot of people know when they're doing this and they they're just like, "Eh, I like Google's not going to they're like, Google's not going to find out. It's okay for me to be super lazy with this stuff." In my experience, the sites and the brands that have the greatest wins with SEO over really long periods of time, I'm

13:07talking five plus years, 10 plus years, are sites that are actually just putting in the the work to craft unique content, not going too hard with one tactic when other tactics are suffering. And actually, yeah, that's it. And a lot of people aren't willing to do that because everyone wants to take the shortcut. But I'm telling you, the greatest shortcut is the long cut. When you are playing the long game, you outperform everybody and you often get results way faster than you expect. And it's the same thing

13:39with these self-promotional listicles. Probably a lot of people started doing them recently when hrefs put out this study. when Glenn Alop put out this study on hrefs. Do self-promotional best list boost chat GPT visibility study of 26,283 source URLs and it was overwhelmingly the answer was yes. So lots of people were doing that. Lots of influencers on X and LinkedIn were being like you got to do this and everyone overdid it. Now they're getting hit and it that could impact their ability to do good SEO in the future as well. the overall quality of your site decreases in the eyes of search engines and now pages that should

14:20be ranking might not rank because it's like well if this site was doing this thing spammy well they might be doing other things spammy as well and we just don't trust them as much. It's like if you have a friend that lies to you about one thing are you going to trust them with other things? Well, probably not as much. It's the same concept. And you know personally like I use Google I use ChachiPT which is influenced heavily by

14:44Google. I use Gemini. I use Perplexity. All heavily influenced by Google. And I'm happy to get better results and better information. I want that. And lots of people do as well. A lot of people on Instagram and Tik Tok hate my SEO content because they think I'm promoting this type of spam. And I'm certainly not. I want us all to do amazing SEO. Give searchers what they want. And when you do that, you benefit

15:09as well. So that's all for the episode. This is some crazy news. Sorry if this one got a little bit scary for the squeamish ones out there. Had to be shared. Google is firing shots. Thank you to Lily Ray for doing this research. Thank you to Glen Gabe for sharing this. This is actually another post from Glen Gabe. He said, "Heads up, and I have covered this before. For sites dropping with the latest volatility, they are

15:31dropping in in AI overviews as well. That makes complete sense since AI overviews and AI mode are extensions of search. So if you are impacted by updates like the latest unconfirmed update, then you can drop in search AI overviews AI mode and then any AI search platform leveraging Google's results, chat GPT, Gemini, etc. Perplexity and of course you can drop in other Google surfaces like news, discover, images, etc. Beware. That's all for episode 946 of the Edward Show. 946 days in a row doing this podcast. If you want my method of SEO that is very durable to Google updates that is in line with what Google wants where my pages that I have

16:15published in 2019 are still ranking number one for their purchase intent keywords without me having changed the pages because I made pages that searchers want and Google wants. If you want to learn how to do that, I have a 13 and 1/2 hour course that I spent so long making and that I actually update

16:36all the time at compactkeywords.com. Please, if you go to the page, watch the video at the top and just check out the video testimonials on the page. Says it says everything that you need to know. You will love the course. So, if you go and check it out, thank you. And that is all for this episode of the podcast. If you watch this on YouTube, thank you so much for watching. If you listened on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, thank you so much for listening and I will talk to

17:00you again tomorrow.