On ChatGPT, list pages made up 14.16% of the citations in the 150,300 software buying answers our panel collected between 2 September and 21 October 2026, and sat under 46.18% of its answers.1 Google AI Mode leaned on them about twice as hard.
The slide that sells a listicle budget usually says lists are the most cited content type. The number that should set the budget is narrower: which lists, and whether being on them gets you named.
This page is for the marketing leader deciding whether to pay for list pages or list placements. It sets our own measurement of two software categories beside the published studies of the same question and the research of Qvery, our sister company, each read at its origin.
Highlights
Read together, they say lists carry a real share of a software answer, bigger on Google than on ChatGPT and biggest when the buyer is choosing. That share rests on a short run of pages the engines keep citing and share with each other. Being on those pages goes with being named, and being left off them goes with being named less often than if no list were cited at all.
Lists Are One in Seven ChatGPT Citations and Nearly Twice That on AI Mode
Empact Partners, a go-to-market consultancy that has worked inside software companies’ marketing teams since 2020, runs the Empact Panel for partners: every week it asks ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Claude a partner’s unbranded buying questions and stores every page the answers cite.
For this page we read eight weeks of one B2B software category, 150,300 answers, and counted the pages the panel classes as lists, meaning several products ranked or compared on one page:
Each share is a floor, because the panel counts only pages it is sure are lists, and on Google AI Mode about a third of citations went to pages left ambiguous or never typed.
The second category we measure, consumer finance software, landed within a point on ChatGPT: lists sat under 45.62% of answers and made up 13.75% of citations, against 58.36% and 24.73% on Google AI Mode.3
The published shares range widely, and most of the spread is the denominator each study divides by:
| Study | What it counted | Lists’ share |
|---|---|---|
| Seer Interactive | 2 million ChatGPT citations on fixed prompts, a URL containing “best” or “top”, November 2025 to February 2026 | 16.6% of citations6 |
| Qvery, our sister company | Cited links sorted by kind, on the buyer questions Qvery asks every day for the companies it measures, July 2026 | 20.52% on ChatGPT, 32.16% on Google AI Mode4 |
| Wix Studio AI Search Lab | 1,056,727 citations from ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Perplexity, four kinds of intent | 21.88% of citations7 |
| Scrunch | About 8,000 classified AI-cited pages, May to June 2026 | 33% comparison and evaluation pages8 |
| Ahrefs | 750 ChatGPT prompts in software, products and agencies | 43.8% of page types9 |
| Evertune | The 6,000 most-cited URLs per model across six models, nearly 400 million citations | 63% of citations, and 40% to 65% of each model’s most-cited URLs10 |
A study of the most-cited URLs finds the pages engines reuse most, and half of those are lists. A study of every citation also counts the long tail of product pages, documentation and forum threads around them. Our 14.16% counts every citation in buying answers, which puts it with Seer and Qvery at the low end, and it is the figure to budget against.
Qvery, our sister company, records day by day how ChatGPT and Google AI Mode answer the buyer questions of the companies it measures, mostly in software, services, insurance and travel. Because it is ours, discount its numbers accordingly. Each Qvery study on this page links to its own method, and the evidence underneath is there for you to check.
This count is the first thing we measure when we set out to make a partner the brand AI engines name for its category, which is our Generative Engine Optimization work. How much of the category’s answers rest on lists, engine by engine, decides how much of the budget lists deserve.
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When the Buyer Is Choosing, the Answer Leans on Lists
In our two software categories the share moved more with the buyer’s wording than with the category, so we split the same answers by what each question asked:
The more precisely a buyer describes the need, the less the answer leans on a list. A list ranks products for a category, and a requirement question asks about one product’s fit, the kind of question ChatGPT takes to the vendor’s own site.
The published studies find the same split, sharpest where the contrast is choosing against learning:
On a list question the brand is named far more often than it is cited. In BuzzStream’s prompt study only 7.2% of mentions on “best project management tools” style prompts came with a citation of the brand’s own page.12 The list is the evidence the engine reads, and the name is what the buyer reads.
The Share Is Falling on ChatGPT and Holding on Google AI Mode
Our own eight weeks moved too much to read as a trend, because both engines changed collectors inside the window. Qvery asked the same buyer questions every month from February to July, which makes the cleaner series.
On those fixed questions lists fell from 32.26% to 21.4% of ChatGPT’s cited links, and from 37.18% to 31.68% on Google AI Mode.4 By July 50.33% of ChatGPT’s links went to product and service pages, two and a half times the list share.4
Seer Interactive caught the start of the fall, and Minuttia and two Toronto researchers measured where ChatGPT went instead:
So ChatGPT reads lists to build a shortlist and then checks each name on the vendor’s own site. The list still decides who is on the shortlist, and the vendor’s product pages decide what the answer says about each name. Google AI Mode keeps citing the list itself.
The checking step is the site half of the work, and our Content Marketing workstream plans those product and comparison pages from the same map of cited sources.
A Few Lists Carry the Weight, and the Engines Keep Citing Them
If lists carry the weight, the next question is which lists. Over eight weeks ChatGPT cited 3,198 different list pages in the B2B category, and most of the weight sat on a few of them.1
The tail is long and almost weightless. The third of cited lists that turned up in one answer carried 1.3% of ChatGPT’s list citations between them.1 Google AI Mode had the same shape, 77.26% of its list citations on its top tenth and 37.09% on its top 1%.1 In the smaller consumer finance category the ten most-cited lists carried 51.8% of ChatGPT’s list citations.3
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The short list also holds still. We compared weeks collected the same way, so the change is the engine’s and not our collector’s:
The engines share the same few as well. 37.71% of the lists ChatGPT cited were also cited by Google AI Mode, and those shared lists carried 62.41% of ChatGPT’s list citations.1 602 lists were cited by all three engines, and they carried 46.91% of ChatGPT’s list weight and 63.71% of Google AI Mode’s.1
Other measurements of how long a cited list lasts point the same way:
Those findings fit together. No single vendor owns the list layer of a software category, yet a small share of the pages carries most of it, so the pages worth being on already exist and can be counted.
That count is what Existing Article Outreach works from, our method inside the SEO workstream: we take the lists a partner’s category answers already cite and work to get the partner onto the ones that leave it out, rather than publishing new lists and waiting for an engine to find them.
Listed Vendors Get Named, and Left-Off Vendors Fare Worse Than No List
Qvery’s July records found that an answer citing only other companies’ lists named the measured company 25.85% of the time, no better than an answer citing no list (25.28%), and 77.80% when the list was the company’s own.4
Qvery could not see whether those other lists named the company. Our panel opens the cited lists and records which vendors each one names, so we could split them.
An answer already heading toward a vendor may be the reason its pages get fetched, so read what follows as an association inside our answers. For every tracked vendor competing in the question’s product line, how often the answer named it:
Pool the two middle cases the way Qvery had to, and ChatGPT names the vendor 41.11% of the time, Google AI Mode 28.93%.1 The average is real and it hides the decision. A cited list that names you goes with being named about half the time, and a cited list that leaves you out goes with being named less often than no list at all.
The gap holds inside each vendor, which rules out the easy reading that big vendors are simply both listed and named:
The own-list figure is the one to read most carefully. The published tests that tried to separate cause from coincidence find the effect smaller:
A list of your own helps, by less than the raw number says, and it can hand the answer to the rivals on it.
The lever with more reach is a place on somebody else’s cited list, because it adds a third party vouching for you and because most of the lists an engine cites are not yours. Qvery found a company’s own list among the sources of only 8.55% of ChatGPT’s answers on the questions it tracks.4
Third parties carry most of the naming anyway, and the name does not always need a page:
Working with Empact Partners on this starts with an audit of the category’s answers, engine by engine, and the map that comes out of it: every cited list, the weight it carries and whether it names the partner.
The outreach then goes to the heaviest lists that leave the partner out, and the panel shows every week whether the answers start naming them. It is the Mentions side of GEO = UGC + Mentions, the formula our GEO work is built on, and it moves over quarters rather than weeks.
Who Writes the Cited Lists, and What They Carry
Many cited lists are a vendor’s own page, and the cited ones look alike:
| What the cited list carries | How often | Whose measurement |
|---|---|---|
| 2026 in the title | 77.74% of the lists ChatGPT cited, 60.45% on Google AI Mode1 | Our B2B software category, September and October 2026 |
| 2026 in the title | 71.68% of the lists ChatGPT cited3 | Our consumer finance software category |
| 2026 in the title, stated criteria, a side-by-side table | 73.87%, 93.69% and 64.41% of cited vendor roundups16 | Qvery, September software set |
| Updated in 2025 | 79.1% of 1,100 cited blog lists, 26% in the previous two months9 | Ahrefs, three categories |
| A low-authority domain | 35% of 3,000 cited lists9 | Ahrefs |
| Vendors named on the page | A median of 11 of the vendors we track1 | Our B2B category, 663 lists opened |
A cited list is current, says how it chose, ranks its products and names a long field. Ranked lists made up 71% to 86% of listicles among each model’s most-cited URLs in Evertune’s data.10 Last year’s date is close to disqualifying: 0.59% of the lists ChatGPT cited in our B2B category carried 2025 in the title.1
The long field cuts both ways. In Kenyon Digital’s test, a brand’s own list naming eight or more competitors backfired 57% of the time, against 29% with three or fewer.17 And a page naming more of the brands buyers ask about is cited more, by 11.8% per standard deviation within a website, in Chen and Koudas’ data.13
Where the list sits in the engine’s search matters as much as what is on it. In Minuttia’s Perplexity data, a vendor list found in first position was cited 85% of the time, falling to 44% at position 20.5 A list that ranks is read, and a list that is read shapes the shortlist, which is why the lists that already rank and get cited come before any new one.
Count the Cited Lists That Leave You Out
Watch one number per engine: of the most-cited lists in your category’s answers, how many name you. In our B2B category it separates being named about half the time from being named less than one time in ten, it changes slowly enough to act on, and it is the honest test of whether listicle spend is working.
What our evidence cannot settle is cause. The panel shows that listed vendors are named far more often, in one B2B software category over eight weeks, and the vendors that win places on those lists may be the ones the engine already favored.
If the lists your buyers’ answers lean on leave you out, book a call with me, and let’s see whether we could work together.
Sources
- Empact Partners, the Empact Panel on one B2B software category: unbranded buying questions asked on ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Claude in eight weekly waves, 150,300 answers, 2 September to 21 October 2026, read 28 October 2026.
- Empact Partners, the Empact Panel on the same category, weeks compared inside one collector per engine: ChatGPT 2 September against 7 October, Google AI Mode 30 September against 21 October, Claude 2 September against 21 October 2026, read 28 October 2026.
- Empact Partners, the Empact Panel on one consumer finance software category: unbranded buying questions asked on ChatGPT and Google AI Mode in six weekly waves, 12,000 answers, 15 September to 25 October 2026, read 28 October 2026.
- Qvery, Are Listicles Still the Most Cited Pages in AI Search?, 2026, updated 20 October 2026.
- Minuttia, Self-Promotional Content Data Study (2026), Zacharias Xiroudakis, 27 October 2026, with Convex Works: 18,084 software questions on six platforms, August 2026.
- Ahrefs, Do Self-Promotional “Best” Lists Boost ChatGPT Visibility? Study of 26,283 Source URLs, Glen Allsopp, 4 December 2025.
- Search Engine Land, AI search loves listicles: What 25,000 URLs reveal about citations, Evertune, 19 May 2026.
- Wix Studio AI Search Lab, The content types most cited by LLMs, Tom Wells, 23 March 2026.
- Seer Interactive, The Listicle Window Is Closing in AI Search: 30% Decline MoM, Nick Haigler, 25 February 2026.
- Scrunch, What happens when you crown yourself #1: Inside thousands of listicles and their impact on AI answers, Niharika Sharma, 24 September 2026.
- The HOTH, Why AI Cites Listicles More Than It Cites You, Rachel Hernandez, 8 September 2026.
- BuzzStream, How AI Mentions and Cites Your Brand (New Study), Vince Nero, 29 June 2026, updated 14 July 2026.
- Mahe Chen and Nick Koudas, University of Toronto, What Drives AI Citations? Content, Retrieval and Model Knowledge in Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), arXiv, 10 October 2026.
- Qvery, How to Get Your Product Onto the Best-Of Lists AI Answers Cite, 2026, updated 19 October 2026.
- Profound, The half-life of an AI citation is 11 days, Davis McCain, 30 September 2026.
- Qvery, SaaS Best-Tools Roundups With Your Own Product: Worth It?, 2026, updated 19 October 2026.
- Kenyon Digital, The Listicle Backfire Study: I Tested 116 Brand-Authored Listicles in ChatGPT, Matt Kenyon, study run in March 2026.
- AirOps, The Influence of Offsite Signals in AI Search, 17 October 2025.
