A study of 5.32 million organic result rows, published on August 24, 2026, finds that Google has trimmed listicles from its highest positions without removing them from the results page. The pages that survived the cut are not obviously the ones the industry expected.

Growth advisor Kevin Indig published the analysis in his Growth Memo newsletter on Monday, August 24, 2026, describing it as the first of two instalments. The dataset covers 60,000 United States English-language desktop Google queries across 15 verticals, collected with SE Ranking data during a 47-hour window in August 2026. It produced 5.32 million organic-result rows.

The question the memo sets out to answer is narrow and has been circulating in search circles since the winter. Did Google demote listicles, and if so, which ones? The answer that emerges is more awkward than either side of the argument had assumed.

What the dataset covers

Queries were stratified by vertical, by query wording, and by query length, then weighted back to an intended sample mix. Duplicate records were excluded, as were successful crawls that returned empty results pages. A nested subset of 20,000 queries captured additional result features, including AI Overviews, video units, images, People Also Ask boxes, Redditand YouTube.

Each result was classified automatically as a listicle or not, using its title, snippet, URL and website type. The classification separated numbered list articles from unnumbered editorial roundups. It excluded product grids, directories, forums, video pages, single-item reviews and step-by-step guides.

That exclusion list matters for interpreting the numbers. Indig defines a listicle as an article in which the list is the content: discrete items of the same type, comparable with one another, each receiving its own self-contained treatment, under a title that promises a bounded set. A sequential tutorial does not qualify, because step three depends on step two. Listicle items can be reordered without breaking the logic.

The pipeline was checked for completeness, duplicate queries and rank integrity. Website ownership was reviewed manually, and a blind quality review covered 30 pages. The initial classifier pilot reached 100% precision and recall on 30 queries. An untouched production holdout remains the final validation step, which the memo states has not yet been run.

Listicles still occupy half the top 10

The headline count does not support a universal penalty. At least one listicle appeared in the organic top 10 for 55.1% of queries, and in the top three for 32.3%.

A looser signal ran higher still. On 85.9% of results pages, at least one title carried a broad list cue: a one-to-three-digit number, or a word such as best, top, ways, ideas, examples, alternatives, tips, tools, apps or options. The stricter classification, which requires the page structure to match the definition rather than the title alone, brought the figure back to 55.1%.

The 30-point gap between those two measures is itself a finding. Roughly a third of pages that read like listicles in the results snippet are something else once opened.

Query wording drives the outcome

The single strongest predictor of whether Google shows a listicle is how the searcher phrases the request. Google returned 4.5 times more listicles when users explicitly asked for a set of options.

The split is stark. For queries that explicitly ask for ideas, examples, options or the best items, listicles reached the top three at a rate of 54.5%. For implicit category or comparison queries, where the demand for multiple options is only inferred, the top-three rate fell to 10.2%. Informational queries in the comparison group that did not ask for a list produced listicles at a rate of 12.1%.

Format, on this evidence, is not a ranking preference. It is a response to phrasing.

The January to August comparison

To test the demotion claim, Indig held a fixed subset of 2,400 queries and 24,000 results constant and compared January against August. The results moved considerably in that window regardless of format. Only 52.5% of queries showed the same exact URL at position one in both periods. Only 58.3% showed the same domain.

Within that churn, listicles lost ground at the top. At position one, the conservative listicle range fell from between 18.9% and 20.2% in January to between 15.1% and 15.6% in August. Across the top three, the January range of 35.9% to 39.0% narrowed to between 32.0% and 33.0%.

Indig characterises the movement as almost 4% fewer listicles in position one and the top three. That description sits at the conservative end of what the ranges permit: depending on which bounds are compared, the top-three decline runs from 3.9 to 6.0 percentage points. The memo does not reconcile the two figures.

His conclusion on the central question is unambiguous. "Google has systematically and carefully weeded out certain listicles," Indig writes, attributing the effect to an unannounced mid-January update and to quality and velocity signals in recent spam work.

Vendor listicles gained rather than lost

Here the data cuts against the prevailing industry account. The assumption through the first half of 2026 was that the January movement targeted self-promoting listicles, the format in which a software vendor publishes a ranking of its own category and installs itself at number one.

The dataset does not confirm that. Of vendor-authored listicles, 62% gained estimated organic traffic since January, and the median page gained 38%. Indig states plainly that he cannot trace the observed decline back to self-promoting listicles specifically.

That finding sits alongside prior research the memo cites rather than replicates. Analysis covered by PPC Land in March 2026 found that sites built on self-serving listicles lost up to 49% of visibility following the January ranking fluctuations, with all identified cases drawn from the SaaS sector and sharing characteristics including scaled output, unedited AI text, artificial freshness updates and schema misuse. Indig's sample is broader and finds the opposite direction of travel for vendor listicles as a class. Both statements can hold if the January action was narrow enough to punish a specific cluster of publishers while leaving the format untouched, which is precisely the reading the memo offers.

A second contradiction is left open. Peec data referenced in the memo shows no demotion of self-promoting listicles in citations across ChatGPT, Google AI, Perplexity, Copilot, Gemini and AI Overviews. The generative layer, on that evidence, has not applied whatever filter the organic layer applied.

Publishers outrank brands in head-to-head matchups

One suggestive signal does point toward differential treatment. Almost half of the listicles in the sample came from publishers rather than from known brands or vendors.

In 4,026 direct matchups where a publisher listicle and a brand or vendor listicle appeared on the same results page, the publisher won 54.0%. Examining the top five results, the publisher averaged position 4.24 in those matchups against 4.71 for the brand or vendor.

Conditional rank, measured when a domain type placed a listicle in the top 10 at all, followed the same order. Publishing and content platforms averaged 3.76. Publishers averaged 3.99. Government, academic and nonprofit sites averaged 4.48. Brands and vendors averaged 4.65.

The supplier base is wide. Some 5,765 domains supplied top-10 listicle leaders. The top 10 domains accounted for 18.3% of those placements and the top 50 for 36.5%, leaving 63.5% distributed across the remaining 5,715 domains. Concentration, on this measure, is low.

The vertical spread is where B2B stands out

Listicle occurrence in the organic top 10 ranged from 42.0% in entertainment and gaming to 67.2% in beauty and fashion. B2B software reached 62.5%. Travel reached 49.3%.

Brand and vendor listicles varied far more sharply than the overall figure. They appeared in the top 10 on 46.2% of B2B software results pages, against 3.3% in food and 6.2% in travel.

That gap is the clearest structural signal in the dataset. Self-published category rankings are a business-to-business tactic almost exclusively, deployed where the buyer researches through search and the vendor has the content operation to sustain it. Indig reads the concentration as evidence that the format is being used as an AI search optimisation lever, and that the lever has limited application in consumer categories.

The demand-side context arrives from a sponsored section of the same memo. According to AirOps, whose 2026 Marketing Leaders Reality Index surveyed more than 300 marketing executives, 86.6% are prioritising AI search, 75.4% received higher pipeline or revenue targets while only 43.0% saw any budget increase, and 23% feel confident measuring the result. The figures are sponsor-supplied and appear in the memo as such.

Reddit, YouTube and AI Overviews compress the click

The finding with the most direct commercial consequence has nothing to do with ranking position at all.

On 92% of results pages containing a top-10 listicle, Reddit or YouTube also appeared somewhere on the page. Both platforms appeared together on 53% of those pages. The average share of AI Overviews across all verticals reached 83.7%, rising to 93.4% in B2B, the vertical where listicles are most concentrated.

"Even where listicles perform well, the click opportunity shrinks," Indig writes.

The two platforms occupy different territory. Where Reddit appeared in the top 10, it placed in the top three on 70.7% of those pages, against 11.1% for YouTube. Reddit's best result averaged position 3.31 with a median of 2. YouTube averaged 6.62 with a median of 7. On the 19,729 pages where both appeared in the top 10, Reddit ranked above YouTube 84.5% of the time, a figure that rose to 90.4% on explicit list queries and fell to 69.9% on implicit category or comparison queries.

YouTube recovers reach outside the standard organic list. In the 20,000-query advanced panel, video boxes and AI Overview citations added 20.7 percentage points of YouTube reach beyond the pages where YouTube already ranked in the organic top 10. The equivalent increase for Reddit was 2.1 percentage points.

Vertical patterns diverge. Reddit held greater organic top-10 presence than YouTube in 11 of 15 verticals, with its largest advantages in travel at 40.6 percentage points, education and careers at 22.8, finance at 21.9, family and pets at 21.1, and automotive at 19.6. YouTube led in four: food at 40.8 percentage points, health at 19.1, home and DIY at 15.1, and beauty and fashion at 6.1. Reddit's organic top-10 presence peaked at 77.1% in automotive and bottomed at 25.7% in health. YouTube peaked at 78.1% in food and fell to 29.7% in travel.

The practical effect Indig describes is a page that loses attention without losing rank. Listicle-related keywords carry the surface markers of buyer intent. The pages that serve them now sit below or beside a generated answer, a forum thread and a video.

What the study does not establish

The memo is explicit about its limits. The study is observational and reflects a single crawl wave. It identifies associations between query wording, listicle presence and ranking. It does not identify causal effects, and it cannot attribute the January-to-August movement to any named Google update.

The production holdout has not been run. The January comparison rests on a 2,400-query subset rather than the full sample. And the classifier, while accurate on its pilot, applies a definitional boundary that other researchers may draw differently, which is a plausible source of the divergence between this dataset and earlier vendor-specific analyses.

Why this matters for the marketing community

For teams that built AI search programmes on self-published category rankings, the dataset removes one argument and supplies another. Rank has held. The 62% traffic gain among vendor listicles indicates that the January action did not sweep the format away, and the 46.2% presence rate in B2B software results confirms the tactic remains widely deployed.

What has changed is the value of the placement. A top-three position on a results page carrying an AI Overview, a Reddit thread and a video box is not the asset it was two years ago. Ahrefs research covered by PPC Land in February 2026 put the click-through decline for top-ranking pages at 58% when an AI Overview is present, close to double the 34.5% the same firm measured in April 2025. A randomised field experiment reported in July 2026 placed the publisher click reduction at 39.8%. Indig's 83.7% average AI Overview share, and 93.4% in B2B, describes the surface on which those reductions now apply to nearly every listicle query.

The competitive picture is consistent with what other datasets have recorded. Datos research published in April 2026 found Reddit rising to second place among post-search destinations in the United States, with YouTube holding first. SISTRIX analysis from the same month identified user-generated platforms as the dominant gainers in German Google visibility. Google has denied applying any ranking preference to Reddit, a position documented in August 2026 after the platform lost visibility across two 2026 updates.

The enforcement backdrop has also shifted. Google extended its spam policies to cover AI Overviews and AI Mode in May 2026, the first time the documentation explicitly addressed generated surfaces, and released a global spam update in June 2026. Self-promotional listicles inside AI Overviews were documented as early as May 2025, and SEO analyst Lily Ray described companies publishing thousands of such pages in a May 2026 interview.

Indig's second instalment, covering the characteristics of listicles that perform and whether the format remains worth producing, is scheduled for the following week.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Kevin Indig, a growth advisor who publishes the Growth Memo newsletter, produced the analysis using SE Ranking data. The findings concern Google, publishers, business-to-business software vendors, Reddit and YouTube.

What: A study of 5.32 million organic-result rows across 60,000 queries finding that listicles appear in the organic top 10 for 55.1% of queries and in the top three for 32.3%, that listicle share at position one fell from a range of 18.9% to 20.2% in January to between 15.1% and 15.6% in August, and that 62% of vendor-authored listicles nonetheless gained estimated organic traffic over the same period, with a median gain of 38%.

When: The memo was published on August 24, 2026. The underlying crawl ran over a 47-hour window in August 2026, compared against a January 2026 baseline drawn from a fixed 2,400-query subset.

Where: United States English-language desktop Google results across 15 verticals.

Why: The data separates two claims that have been merged in industry discussion since January. A targeted reduction in listicle presence at the top of results did occur, but it cannot be traced to self-promoting vendor content, which gained rather than lost. The more consequential finding for advertisers and publishers is that 92% of results pages carrying a top-10 listicle also carry Reddit or YouTube, and AI Overviews appear on 83.7% of pages overall and 93.4% in business-to-business queries, compressing the click available to any page that ranks.