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This is a new thing people are doing to hack ChatGPT. Self promotional listicles where all the other companies mentioned don't even exist. A self promotional listicle is when you give a list of the best X for Y, the top 10 best SEO companies in Belfast, then you name yourself as number one.

That's why it's a self promotional listicle.

Companies are getting next level lazy, making up competing companies that don't actually exist. These aren't real. When ChatGPT looks for the best X for y, it comes across these listicles.

It recommends the top source.

This year in 2026, companies were spamming these self promotional listicles. They were occurring everywhere. It might be tempting to try this yourself, but before you do.

There is a very consistent trend among companies that try this.

They tend to have this pattern. They're usually scaling these best listicles using AI. They'll see a crazy increase in traffic as they're doing this.

They're also scaling bad user signals.

Self promotional listicles do pretty poorly in Google. Searchers don't like it, they hit a tipping point. Their visibility collapses.

Quickup did this.

This is what happened to their entire blog. It got destroyed. Shopify did this too, and I made a podcast about it here.

They got destroyed as well.

The crazy truth. Self promotional listicles will work for a little bit, even if you make up competitors, but companies tend to spam them with thousands of posts. Hit a tipping point and Lose everything if you'd like to save years.

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