Looks like the chatter about Google hitting LLM-focused self-serving (and utterly trash) listicles has heated up a bit recently. I’ve seen a few cases across social where people are showing a more recent algorithmic hit on sites using this tactic.
Here is an example from Lily Ray, who notes she now has “a list of about 30 sites that fit this exact criteria.”
Found another site with 200+ "best" listicles - this one is a very expensive exact-match domain owned by an SEO agency, where the #1 best company in each listicle is either that agency or the EMD itself.
— Lily Ray 😏 (@lilyraynyc) March 12, 2026
It worked really throughout 2025, but the drop also started right on ~Jan… pic.twitter.com/aOXbkLh5SF
Gagan Ghorta recently posted that he has seen various enterprise companies scaling content with LLM-focused activities (that resulted in less-than-quality content production) get hit in the Google organic results.
In the example, he takes a pretty hard shot at Webflow, which has been very vocal about its “AEO” focus.
We're living in probably the most weirdest Enterprise SEO times! So many big brands who scaled search traffic using unnecessary and irrelevant content losing traffic from usual search results nowadays meanwhile senior executives working for those brands posting that their GEO/AEO… pic.twitter.com/BiVxDrmHlY
— Gagan Ghotra (@gaganghotra_) March 6, 2026
This is just one example, so I'm curious if people think enterprise companies are pursuing this course of behavior across the board. My personal experience is that enterprise companies are split on this line of thinking.
Regardless, we first saw this back when Barry Schwartz, web technologist and lead reporter at SERountable, covered it on February 4th, 2026. Folks like Lily Ray and Glenn Gabe noted huge drop-offs in organic visibility for sites using these tactics at the time.
I personally don’t think it’s just listicles; I’ve seen cases of thin-content targeting LLMs beyond just listicles get hit. Which brings up the question of how to balance LLM visibility performance with organic search performance?
However, as Lily noted, folks are seeing immediate results with these sorts of tactics. It does appear, though, that they eventually hit a wall with Google’s organic search algorithms.
Definitely give Lily's original post covering the topic a read.
What are you seeing?
Forum discussion out there in the ether.
