Brands Are Gaming AI Search with Self-Promotional Listicles

For as long as Google has existed, companies have tried to game it. The latest version of that race, reported by Will Oremus in The Atlantic, has a new name: sloptimization. The target is no longer a human skimming results pages. It is the AI chatbot that scrapes the web, reads a ranked list, and parrots whatever it found back to the next person who asks.

The mechanics Oremus describes are simple. Shopify has published more than 60 ranked listicles with titles like "10 Best Ecommerce Platforms for Small Business in 2026," and in every one, Shopify ranks first. The runner-up may change; the winner does not. ClickUp, the piece reports, has published nearly 300 self-promotional listicles. The strategy works because AI tools currently fail to differentiate between an independent review and one the brand itself wrote.

The practice also goes by GEO, for generative-engine optimization, a follow-on to traditional SEO. Old SEO rewarded whoever Google's algorithm judged most authoritative. GEO rewards whoever produced the most semantically plausible answer to the query an AI is likely to field, and the major chatbots have so far been worse than traditional search at recognizing when the writer and the subject are the same company.

The honest caveat is that the tactic may already be turning on the brands running it. SEO analyst Lily Ray found, in a separate analysis, that Google has begun decoupling citations from recommendations in AI Overviews: a brand's self-serving listicle may earn a citation while the actual recommendation goes to the rivals the brand mentioned. What the Atlantic piece does not settle is how quickly AI platforms will close that gap at scale, or what the floor looks like once they do.

Meanwhile, Shopify's Q1 2026 commerce data reportedly showed AI chatbot referral sessions growing more than 8x year over year and AI-referred orders growing nearly 13x. The commercial stakes behind chatbot recommendations are large enough that the incentive to game them is not going to disappear on its own.