A 60,000-query study measures Google's listicle demotion

The measured drop

Kevin Indig pulled 60,000 US-English desktop Google queries across 15 verticals through SE Ranking, collecting 5.32 million organic-result rows over a 47-hour window in August 2026. To isolate change over time, he compared a fixed subset of 2,400 queries and 24,000 results against the same queries from January. Only 52.5% kept the same URL in position one, and only 58.3% kept the same domain.

Within that churn, listicles lost ground at the top. The conservative estimate of listicles at position one fell from a range of 18.9% to 20.2% in January to 15.1% to 15.6% in August. Across the top three, the range dropped from 35.9% to 39.0% down to 32.0% to 33.0%. Indig's own summary: almost 4% fewer listicles in position one and the top three.

That is smaller than the alarm that started this. The piece notes that when Google's unannounced update hit in January, some SaaS brands lost 29 to 49% of organic visibility within weeks. The anecdotal losses were steep. The aggregate demotion, measured across 15 verticals in August, is single digits.

Listicles still work for most brands

• 62% of vendor-authored listicles gained estimated organic traffic since January, with a median gain of 38%.

• Listicles still appear in the top 10 for 55.1% of all queries and the top three for 32.3%.

• The query matters more than the algorithm: explicit "best of" queries put a listicle in the top three 54.5% of the time, against 10.2% for queries that only imply a list, and just 12.1% appearance for informational queries that do not ask for a list at all.

Where brands still lean on it hardest

Brand or vendor listicles appear in the top 10 on 46.2% of B2B software results pages, against 3.3% in food and 6.2% in travel. ChatGPT already cites listicles in 43.8% of its 26,283 sampled source URLs, which is the reason B2B brands keep writing them.

This is memo one of two. Indig has not yet published which listicle traits correlate with holding rank, or whether brands should keep writing them at all.