{"id":23641,"date":"2026-08-31T09:10:43","date_gmt":"2026-08-31T09:10:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scannn.com\/what-makes-a-good-listicle-by-kevin-indig\/"},"modified":"2026-08-31T09:10:43","modified_gmt":"2026-08-31T09:10:43","slug":"what-makes-a-good-listicle-by-kevin-indig","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scannn.com\/lv\/what-makes-a-good-listicle-by-kevin-indig\/","title":{"rendered":"What makes a good listicle? - by Kevin Indig"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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This Memo was sent to 28,991 subscribers. Welcome to +98 new readers! Sign up for free to get new insights every week, or sign up for Premium to get exclusive tools and frameworks that make you more effective.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

How do you write a listicle that performs well in classic and AI Search?<\/span><\/p>\n

In<\/span> last week\u2019s Memo<\/span><\/a>, I dug deep into 5.3M search results to see if Google demoted listicles or not.<\/span><\/p>\n

Quick recap:<\/span><\/p>\n

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    Listicles are still everywhere.<\/span><\/strong> At least one true listicle appeared in the top 10 SERP results for 55.1% of the 60,000 queries analyzed, and in the top 3 for 32.3%.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/li>\n

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    Query intent is the biggest lever.<\/span><\/strong> Google shows 5.3x more listicles when the query explicitly asks for a set of options.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/li>\n

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    No universal demotion.<\/span><\/strong> Google shuffled who ranks: only 52.5% of queries kept the same position-one URL between January and August.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/li>\n

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    Publishers beat brands.<\/span><\/strong> Publishers supplied 46.8% of the highest-ranking listicles vs. 19.2% for brands\/vendors, and won 54% of head-to-head matchups on the same SERP.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/li>\n

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    Results vary sharply by vertical.<\/span><\/strong> Top-10 listicle presence ranged from 42.0% (entertainment\/gaming) to 67.2% (beauty\/fashion); brand-owned listicles appeared on 46.2% of B2B software SERPs, reflecting how heavily B2B leans on the tactic for AI search.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/li>\n

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    The real threat is indirect: competition for attention.<\/span><\/strong> 92% of listicle SERPs carried Reddit or YouTube, and AI Overviews covered 83.7% of queries on average (93.4% in B2B).<\/span><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    In Part 2 below, I\u2019m answering the question: <\/span>What makes a listicle perform well?<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

    I analyzed over 15 variables across 3,000 listicles, but most of them didn\u2019t survive the control checks, where I did a few analyses to determine if the findings held when normalizing certain variables. Interpret the ones with a \u201cyes\u201d in the <\/span>Direction stable<\/span><\/em> column below as \u201cmaybe, but we cannot prove it yet.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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    The clearest signal was freshness<\/span><\/strong>. A date from the previous 2 years appeared on 66.6% of pages in the top 3, compared with 57.3% of pages in positions 8-10. That\u2019s likely not a surprise: Search and LLMs love freshness.<\/span><\/p>\n

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    An old date, or a date the crawler could not interpret, appeared on 8.2% of top-3 pages and 15.1% of pages in positions 8-10.<\/span><\/p>\n

    After controlling for vertical, query wording, and listicle type, an old or unreadable date was associated with <\/span>56% lower odds of ranking in the top 3<\/span><\/strong> (when filtering down to one page per domain).<\/span><\/p>\n

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    If a finding from this week changes a decision for your brand, the <\/span>Growth Memo Premium Resource Library<\/span><\/a> has 45+ (and growing) checklists, light tools, AI workflows, and stakeholder slide decks to put it to work.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

    Counted listicles perform better.<\/span><\/strong> A <\/span>counted listicle<\/span><\/em> is one that has an explicit item count or numbered-list evidence in its title or search snippet, such as \u201c17 Best Project Management Tools.\u201d An <\/span>editorial roundup<\/span><\/em> recommends or compares several options without an explicit number, such as \u201cThe Best Project Management Tools.\u201d The name describes how the page was classified in this analysis, not whether someone manually counted every item on the page.<\/span><\/p>\n