"Self-promotional listicles are dying" is the new SEO narrative making the rounds and we've had multiple clients Slack us asking if we should change our strategy of producing list posts.

In this episode, we break down Lily Ray's Substack post that started it all, walk through why the data she shared shows correlation but not causation, and pull up the actual rankings of category-keyword listicles we run for clients to show what's really happening after the late-January 2026 traffic dip.

Then we get into the part nobody else is talking about: 
- How to actually write these posts so they hold up through core updates. 
-Why you don't need to force-rank a list. 
-Why you don't need to call yourself "the best." 
-Why the first-person "I tried all 15 of these" framing is a lie that backfires. 
-And why product schema hacks will get your site torched.

We walk through a negative example, then show two posts that have ranked through multiple Google updates- our own "Best Content Marketing Agencies" post and a client example in trucking management software.

The full written breakdown with screenshots and ranking data is going up on the blog — link in the newsletter: 
growandconvert.com/newsletter

Full blog post on this topic: https://www.growandconvert.com/seo/self-promotional-listicles/