A Growth Memo study published August 24 reports two things about listicles at once: most vendor-authored listicle pages gained estimated traffic since January, and listicle share at position one fell over the same span. Both numbers come from the same author and the same time window. They are not measuring the same thing. The study also sets its own limits: it calls itself observational and says it identifies associations rather than causal effects.
What Did the Listicle Study Actually Find?
Kevin Indig’s Growth Memo study, published August 24, 2026, crawled 60,000 US-English desktop queries across 15 verticals over 47 hours in August 2026, using SE Ranking data and covering 5.32 million organic result rows. Against a fixed subset of 2,400 queries and 24,000 results compared between January 2026 and August 2026, the conservative position-one listicle range fell from 18.9%–20.2% to 15.1%–15.6%, and the top-three range fell from 35.9%–39.0% to 32.0%–33.0%. Separately, 62% of vendor-authored listicles gained estimated organic traffic over the same span, with the median page up 38%. The author states the study “identifies associations between query wording, listicle presence, and ranking, not causal effects.”
Two Numbers, Two Units
The 62%-of-pages, 38%-median figure is estimated organic traffic, attached to individual pages. The memo does not publish the method behind that estimate. The position-one and top-three figures are the listicle share the memo reports at those positions, independent of how much traffic any single page draws. Listicles can appear at position one less often while the vendor-authored ones that do rank pull more estimated traffic per page. Nothing in the two figures requires them to move together, and Indig’s own phrasing keeps them apart: “As a matter of fact, 62% of vendor-authored listicles gained estimated organic traffic since January, and the median page gained 38%.”
January in the Data, Not on Google’s Dashboard
The study compares January 2026 to August 2026, and Indig writes that “we know from Lily Ray’s analyses that the unannounced mid-January Google update impacts listicles,” an observation credited to Ray’s analyses, not to a Google statement. Google’s Search Status Dashboard, checked August 26, 2026, lists no January 2026 entry at all: between the December 2025 core update and the March 2026 spam and core updates, its only ranking entry is the February 2026 Discover update. The mid-January update Indig cites is not one Google’s own record acknowledges.
The Baseline Behind the Headline
The August wave is large: 60,000 queries, 5.32 million results. The January-to-August comparison is not; it runs on the 2,400-query, 24,000-result subset compared between January and August. The study also reports that publishers “won 54.0% of 4,026 direct matchups against a brand or vendor listicle on the same search results page,” a sample of head-to-head matchups, measuring placement against a rival on one results page rather than share over time.
| Metric | January 2026 to August 2026 | Unit |
|---|---|---|
| Position-one conservative listicle range | 18.9%–20.2% to 15.1%–15.6% | listicle share (range) |
| Top-three listicle range | 35.9%–39.0% to 32.0%–33.0% | listicle share (range) |
| Vendor listicle traffic change | 62% of pages gained, median +38% | estimated traffic, not a share |
What the Study Has Not Finished Validating
The listicle classifier behind the study, which sorts pages by owner type and by incentive, was piloted before the full run: “The initial classifier pilot achieved 100% precision and recall on 30 queries, but an untouched production holdout remains the final validation step,” Indig writes, meaning the full-scale classification has not yet passed the check reserved for it. SE Ranking supplied the ranking data the study runs on; Indig is its author. Two AI-citation studies inimino covered in July diverged from each other over sample size and engine mix, a different situation from this one: there, two separate studies disagreed; here, two figures inside one study measure different things. Google has rewritten a help page without documenting the change: Search Engine Land found a rewritten Google Ads help page listing a 7-day default lookback window where Search Engine Land reports 30 days stood before, with Performance Max no longer among the supported campaign types.
Listicles appearing at position one less often in August than in January, and most vendor listicles earning more estimated traffic than they did in January, can both be true, drawn from the same author’s numbers, without either fact canceling the other.
Source: Kevin Indig, “Has Google demoted listicles?,” Growth Memo; Google Search Status Dashboard; PPC Land’s coverage of the same study.