The internet used to feel more like a conversation. You’d search for something — best coffee grinders, cheapest CRM, top podcasts about startups — and tumble into a mix of blogs, weird forums, maybe a Reddit fight or two.
Where there were voices, now there are listicles.
Ten best…
Seven top…
Five you can’t live without…
And when AI showed up, instead of saving us from this swamp, it pulled up a stool, poured itself a drink, and said, “Let’s make more lists.”!
The machine’s version of research is basically reading every “Top 10” article ever written and remixing them into an even blander “Top 5.” It thinks it’s helping — faster answers, fewer clicks — but what it’s really done is laminate the web.
Everything glossy, nothing alive.
Ask any AI search right now for “best protein powder,” “best AI tool for content,” “best productivity app.” You’ll get a polite list of brands you’ve already seen, in roughly the same order, as if the world reached a silent agreement that those are the only names worth knowing.
It’s the internet equivalent of a hotel breakfast buffet: technically abundant, spiritually empty.
This didn’t happen by accident.
Publishers spent years training Google to love listicles. They are easy to scan, full of affiliate links, and conveniently structured for ranking.
Every “Top 10” made the next one easier to justify.
So when AI came along, it looked at the landscape and thought: Oh, this must be how humans explain expertise.
It’s not even wrong. We rewarded predictability, but now we’re drowning in it.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: being on those lists still works, albeit likely for the short term.
You get visibility if you make the cut (or pay to make the cut), whether in a human-written roundup or an AI-generated one. People don’t click as much anymore, but the name recognition still lands.
It’s like background music in a movie: no one notices it, but it shapes the whole scene.
So you can roll your eyes at “The 10 Best Email Tools in 2025,” but if your product’s in there, you’ll quietly cash in on the benefits.
That’s the maddening pragmatism of it: the lists are shitty, but they’re still currency.
The problem isn’t that AI likes lists; it (feels like it) only likes lists.
It doesn’t handle contradiction well. It can’t stomach the messy stuff — the “depends on your situation,” the “this one’s great unless you care about privacy,” the “actually, none of these are that good.”
AI prefers clean certainty.
And certainty, on the internet, is mostly a lie told neatly.
When everything is “Top 10” and “Best Of,” there’s no room left for stories, context, or evolution. You can’t see what changed, only what ranked.
The better move isn’t to rage against it but to outgrow it.
If you make things, write things, sell things, don’t build for the listicle, build under it.
Give the machine what it wants on the surface, but fill it with something real underneath. Make the AI summarize you, but make sure when it does, the quote still sounds human.
Add your caveats. Include the edge cases. Tell the reader what didn’t work.
That’s the content that survives being flattened, the kind that still smells like a person made it.
AI search didn’t invent the shitty listicle. It just industrialized it, and until we stop feeding the system nothing but predictable rankings, it’ll keep spitting out the same five answers wrapped in a different logo.
So, sure, keep getting yourself on the lists; that’s working for now. But somewhere beneath the numbered headlines, write the thing that can’t be summarized, because someday, someone will actually want to know what’s real, not just what’s ranked.
👉 And if you’re a brand working hard to get yourself on lists, just be aware that the boffins in ChatGPT, Perplexity & Google have seen this same problem, and they HATE it enough to be working on irradiating them. What will that mean for your rankings & citation volumes?
(Goes off to write the top 10 problems brands paying to be on shitty listicles will face in a few months… 😀)
Dax Hamman is the CEO & Co-Founder at FOMO.ai and an expert in AI Search & Marketing.