Ranking yourself first in your own "best of" list is backfiring
New numbers across about 100 queries suggest these pages now help competitors more than the brand that wrote them.
If you wrote a "best [product] for [thing]" page on your own site and put your own business at number one, Google's AI answers are quoting it less, and when they do quote it, they often skip you.
Lily Ray (@lilyraynyc) pulled updated numbers across about 100 queries. In September, compared with June, Google's AI Overviews (the AI written summary at the top of search results) cited 38% fewer self-promotional "best of" listicles. When those pages were used, the brand behind them was left out of the recommendation 83% of the time, up from 69% in June.
Your own list is now feeding your rivals
The part that should sting is what happens to the other names on your list. In 70% of cases, Ray found, the self-promoting listicle is helping competitors get recommended while the brand that wrote the page is not part of the recommendation at all.
So the page still does a job. It just does it for the companies you listed second and third. You did the research, you wrote the comparison, and the AI answer repeats everything except your name.
What to do about it
This is one SEO's data on roughly 100 queries, not a Google announcement, so treat it as a strong signal rather than a rule. Nobody has said why the pattern changed.
If you have a roundup page on your site that puts your own product at the top, stop treating it as an AI visibility play. Open it and ask whether it earns its place as a genuinely useful comparison for someone deciding what to buy. If the honest answer is that it exists to rank your own name first, it is now more likely to sell for the competitors in it than for you.
The safer version is a page that answers the question properly, with your own product described clearly on its own page where you are the obvious subject. That also fits the wider pattern this month, where Google has been cracking down on mass-produced, templated pages built for rankings rather than readers.
in 70% of cases, the self-promoting listicle is now helping competitors get recommended while the brand recommending itself is not part of the recommendation