been seeing way too many people obsessed with getting cited in ai overviews lately without looking at who's actually being recommended. turns out google is separating the source from the actual brand suggestion now. some study shows that 69% of the time these self-serving lists get cited but the brand itself gets left out of the final answer entirely. it's basically just giving your competitors free advertising in a snippet. if you're only tracking citations as a success metric, you're missing the point since click rates are already basically dead at 1%. i don't know how anyone can justify building content that literally votes for the competition. is anyone actually seeing any benefit from these listicles anymore?
full read:
https://lilyraynyc.substack.com/p/why-calling-yourself-the-best-could