How to get into third-party "best X" lists

To get into a “best X” list you need to do three things: find the lists that are retrieved for your category, work out how each one picks its entries, and give the editor a reason and the facts to add you. Most brands skip the first step and chase every list they can find. The evidence says a handful of the right ones is what counts.

This lesson covers lists published by someone else. Lists you publish about yourself are a different thing with a different risk, covered near the end.

Why these lists matter

A “best project management tools” article puts your brand next to your category and your competitors in one document. That has always sent referral traffic. It now also feeds AI answers, because comparison lists are what assistants retrieve when someone asks for a recommendation. Peec AI’s 2026 analysis of fan-out queries found that ChatGPT added the word “best” to 24.3% of advice-style questions even when the user had not typed it.

Peec AI studied nearly 200,000 AI responses across eight engines from September 2025 to March 2026. Its findings:

• Holding the top rank in a cited listicle lifted brand visibility by 16.5 percentage points in B2B software.
• 52% of the listicles cited by ChatGPT had high citation rates, although listicles were under a fifth of cited URLs.
• Engines that cite few sources per answer, such as ChatGPT and Copilot, reward the top positions most. Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode cite more widely and show smaller gains per rank.

Peec sells an AI visibility tracker, and the study is correlational. Brands at the top of lists are often the market leaders, which would lift their visibility anyway.

Find the lists that count

Peec’s own summary is the best rule: five strong placements in lists that AI engines retrieve matter more than 50 placements in articles engines never see. So start from retrieval and work back.

1. List your prompts. Write the questions a buyer would ask, such as “best invoicing software for freelancers”.
2. Record what is cited. Run each prompt several times in the assistants your buyers use and note every third-party list that appears as a source. Bing Webmaster Tools shows Copilot’s grounding queries for free. Paid trackers are in the AI visibility tools comparison.
3. Add the lists that rank. Search Google for the same phrases and for “[competitor] alternatives”. Note the lists on page one.
4. Mark the gaps. For each list, record whether you are in it, which competitors are, and your position. A link gap analysis in a backlink tool finds lists that link to rivals and not to you.
5. Rank the targets. Lists cited repeatedly, across several prompts, where competitors appear and you do not, come first.

Work out how each list is made

Lists are built in different ways, and the route in depends on which kind you are looking at.

Type of list	How entries are chosen	Route in
Editorial, tested	A writer tries the products	Product access, a clear angle, patience
Editorial, researched	A writer compiles from reviews and vendor pages	Accurate public facts, strong reviews, a short pitch
Affiliate	The publisher earns commission on sales	A programme the publisher can join. See affiliate programmes
Review platform category page	Ranked by user reviews	A claimed profile and real reviews. See reviews as a signal
Sponsored	Positions are sold and labelled	A media buy, with limited value for AI citations
Pay to play, unlabelled	Positions are sold and not labelled	Avoid

Read the page’s disclosure and methodology notes. Look at whether the links are affiliate links. Check when it was last updated, since a list refreshed every year has a natural moment to add you.

Give the editor a reason

Peec’s recommendation is to give publishers justification: comparison data, reviews and pricing evidence that earn the inclusion. In practice that means a short email with:

• One sentence on who you are best for. Lists are organised by use case. “Best for teams under ten” is a slot. “A great all-round tool” is not.
• Current facts. Pricing, plan limits, platforms supported. Writers copy these, and stale ones are a common reason for being left out.
• Proof. Your rating on the review platform that matters in your category, a named customer, or independent test results.
• Access. A free account or a review unit, with no conditions on what is written.
• A correction, where one is due. If the list already mentions you with wrong pricing or a dead link, fixing that is the easiest first contact.

The pitch itself follows the same rules as any outreach email: short, specific to that page, and from a named person.

Ask for a link with your brand name as the anchor. If the editor adds you without a link, the mention still does its job in AI answers, and you can follow up later as you would with any unlinked mention.

Paid inclusion

A market exists for paid places in lists. Our research holds two price ranges, both low confidence: $200 to over $2,000 per inclusion from practitioner sources, and $49 to over $8,000 in one report on pay-per-placement PR. Treat both as rough indications.

Paying is growing. In BuzzStream’s State of Digital PR 2026 survey of more than 150 practitioners, 80% said they never pay for placements, down from 87.3% in 2025.

The problem is the same one that applies to paid guest posts, with an extra twist.

• Disclosed, a paid placement is legal advertising. But paid and advertorial content was only 0.3% of AI citations in Muck Rack’s May 2026 report, a vendor figure we took from a press release. Labelled placements do little for AI visibility.
• Undisclosed, it deceives the reader. Law-firm summaries of the US Federal Trade Commission’s 2023 Endorsement Guides say the FTC treats paid positions on a ranking site that presents itself as independent as deceptive. We did not find that wording on the FTC’s own guidance page. Google’s spam policies list paid links that pass ranking credit as link spam, and since 15 May 2026 they also cover attempts to manipulate generative AI responses in Google Search.

The honest alternatives are the ones above: an affiliate relationship with disclosed commission, product access, and data that justifies the entry.

Lists you write about yourself

Many brands publish their own “best X” list and put themselves first. Peec AI analysed 232,000 citations across 13,000 software listicles from December 2025 to February 2026. Self-promotional lists made up about 11% of AI citations overall: 10.3% on Google AI Mode, 10.4% on Perplexity and 3.6% on ChatGPT. Peec saw no sign of a correction during those 12 weeks.

The downside is documented. Lily Ray reported on 3 February 2026 that several software sites lost 29% to 49% of their Google organic visibility from mid-January 2026. Common traits were between 10 and 340 self-promotional “best” lists, scaled AI content and titles refreshed with the year. She noted it was one tactic among several, and that some such lists still rank.

One honest comparison page that says who each product suits is defensible. Hundreds are a pattern.

Measure it

Keep a sheet of target lists with four columns: included or not, position, link or no link, and whether the list was cited for your prompts this month. Report mention rate across many runs of those prompts, before and after. Check quarterly.

Where to go next

Lists are one output of digital PR, which is how you earn the coverage that makes editors think of you first. See the glossary for listicle, fan-out and citation.