Our newsletterPractitionerLily Ray, 18 Mar 2026
Publishing lots of comparison or alternatives pages may help at first, but heavy scaling of this tactic can quickly lead to both SEO and AI search declines.
Content production
- Reader Note:
- Lily Ray's own argument, with company examples she checked rather than a study: she reports drops in organic traffic at sites that published comparison and alternatives pages heavily. As with the AI-content cases, the evidence is the timing of a decline against the timing of the publishing, read off third-party traffic estimates.
- Evidence:
- Expert judgment
- Vendor interest:
- Moderate — This comes from a company with a commercial interest in this market, so it is not a neutral source.
- Sample:
- A commentary article drawing on public case studies, selected company traffic examples, Microsoft security research, Similarweb trend data, and the author's review of roughly 30 case studies from AI content tool companies.
Reader Note:
Evidence:
Vendor interest:
Sample:Good for
Hearing how someone who knows the field reads it, and deciding what to check yourself.
Not for
- Anything that needs a measurement. Nobody counted or tested this.
- This comes from a company with a commercial interest in this market, so it is not a neutral source.
- The source talks about this as cause and effect — that is its reading, not a finding.
- The source says how much it looked at, but not how any of it was chosen.
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