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Do Self-Promotional “Best” Lists Boost ChatGPT Visibility? Study of 26,283 Source URLs

Do Self-Promotional “Best” Lists Boost ChatGPT Visibility? Study of 26,283 Source URLs

Across 60,000+ websites we track daily analytics for, ChatGPT sends 8-9x the referral traffic of the next leading AI-first platform, Perplexity.

Just last month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed that more than 800 million people use the platform each week.

But what does it take to get mentioned and cited in its responses?

Our latest research into top-of-the-funnel queries shows that recently updated “best X” lists were the most prominent page type in ChatGPT sources, including those where recommended brands ranked themselves in first place.

There was also a correlation between a brand positioning highly in third-party lists and being more likely to feature in responses.

Does that conclusively mean you should be publishing these lists yourself? Before I share the approach we’re taking, let’s look at the data in full.

supplemental Google Doc that shares lessons learned and ideas for future research based on my findings.
The 8 Best AI Detectors, Tested and Compared” by our own Ryan Law
  • Non-Blog List: Platforms like G2 (software) or Clutch (agency), which rank recommendations but not in a blog post style format
  • Landing page: General pages like a specific service an agency offers, or a market a SaaS company has a solution e.g., this page on Siege Media showing they offer web design services
  • Social media: This covers sites like Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn

    • Links may appear inline with recommendations, or as source links, which were used for research but require an additional click to view.

    Each first-party mention was manually categorized.

    For third-party mentions, totaling 10,000+ individual URLs, we used a semi-automated approach.

    We set up dozens of manual filters to improve accuracy. For example, the learn.g2.com subdomain hosts content types very different from standard G2 category pages.

    For the remaining URLs, we categorized them with OpenAI’s GPT-5 model with custom instructions.

    Finally, we spent time going over each group of URLs and improved tagging where necessary, though we were happy with 95% of what we originally saw.

    In some categories there’s a clear shift in which page type featured prominently. Landing pages are commonly cited when looking for the best software or agency, but rarely show up when researching products.

    General blog posts on product websites performed far better than in the software and agency recommendations space.

    analysis reveals that more or less content can be extracted depending on the domain or page being sourced.

    We’re still studying this, so I hesitate to give a definitive conclusion, but even if AI were not a thing, you would logically want to feature higher on a list of recommended software, products or service providers in your industry.

    even fresher content.

    found that 28% of ChatGPT’s most-cited pages have zero organic visibility.

    My own research found that many questionable sites perform well in Bing but not as well in Google.

    While Ahrefs Domain Rating isn’t a perfect indicator of site quality, if I take 1,000 cited best lists across each category (3,000 in total), I found that a significant portion were published on domains with low authority.

    In simple terms, they have fewer high-quality sites linking to their own.

    As Glenn Gabe covered in his excellent article, Google’s own AI answers should have fewer issues promoting legitimate sites, but other AI search platforms will likely need to develop stronger trust and quality scoring going forward.

    I expect we’ll see the left side of this chart decline over time.

    Ahrefs Brand Radar, all included comparison listicles. And that’s across 150M+ total prompts.

    even more prominent in Google SERPs,

    Across 250 “best X software”-style SERPs, 169 (67.6%) featured a list in which the company writing the article ranks itself number one.

    Perform any type of “best [seo / web design / branding] agency” search in Google and there’s a strong chance you’ll see a self-promotional list ranking well.

    In the products category, it was rare for a company’s own blog list to appear, simply because lots of product companies don’t publish them.

    You won’t see a page on Nike.com recommending Reebok, but they will publish an article on “The Best Winter Sneakers” and promote Nike’s own shoes throughout.

    There isn’t anything new about creating pages to cover the markets you serve and the features you offer, but you might want to make sure those pages are valuable and up to date.

    a great point on LinkedIn that poor user signals might catch up with you in due course.

    Siege Media founder Ross Hudgens agrees these signals are important, but argues you can position your own brand first and still provide value.

    Agency owner Wil Reynolds, whom I’ve respected for years, had another opinion:

    Any marketer worth a damn knows listing yourself at the top of a list hosted on your site doesn’t build trust with buyers.

    It wasn’t a common occurrence, but I did find examples of companies featuring lower down their own lists.

    DoorLoop placed itself 7th on this list of rental management software providers

    While it’s admirable as someone with no connection to the business, there’s also the argument that they’re just helping competitors with their own marketing.

    You’ll have to decide which approach makes sense for your business, but let me at least share our current take.

    At Ahrefs, our thinking is simple: We may publish more comparison posts as we roll out new features or enter new markets, but they’ll continue to make up less than half a percent of our total blog content.

    We’re not going to create them for every tool or potential use case.

    We won’t always put ourselves in the top spot, as is already the case.

    We’ll continue to make it clear that we are the Ahrefs being recommended.

    (Almost every company promoting itself does so in the third person, as if they’re subtly trying to overlook that they’re writing about their own business.)

    And we’ll keep linking directly to alternative solutions so visitors can research them on their own.

    One change we are making thanks to this research is to celebrate more of our wins.

    There were many cases where brands were mentioned alongside positive company updates, as shown below for Monday.com.

    In another case, when gym management software Kilo was mentioned, it was alongside their announcement of earning an award from Capterra.

    We could do a much better job there, with the potential added benefit of giving LLMs enticing commentary to use with any mentions.

    Our primary focus will continue to be on things that have naturally gotten us mentioned on the lists of others, like constantly updating our product with new features, sharing original data and research, and being active where our audience is.

    Mentions from brands like Zapier are always nice to see

    As we’ve done when we spent $400,000 running an event, $1M+ sponsoring creators, or revealing how we decide the business potential of new blog posts, we’ll keep you in the loop about how our approach to AI search visibility evolves.

    Stay tuned for some behind-the-scenes updates I’m working on there.

    If you have any thoughts on how I could improve the next iteration of this study or anything else you would like me to dive into, please let me know over on LinkedIn or X.

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