If you’ve ever searched for a product, service or agency, you’ve likely been met by entire results pages of ‘top/best’ listicles.

The 10 Best SaaS Marketing Agencies

The 8 Best Time Management Tools

Blah blah.

They are an SEO tactic that aims to teach search engines and now AI tools, that your offering is one of the best. Recently though, Google looks like it decided to clamp down on this type of content.

It’s an interesting turn of events. They are one of the easiest pieces to produce — take it from me — especially at scale (and especially with AI), yet perhaps it shows that human judgment is still important, even to Google.

Sure, AI can do the deep research, and easily write the content to fit a template, but can it understand what each product/service truly is? And to what category it fits in? And how can it offer a review or opinion on something it can’t use? Can it give anything more than surface level thoughts on something, and give genuine value to a reader?

I still think most SEO content is going to be AI-produced, in the very near future, but human editorial and judgment is going to be the skill that sets content apart.