Table of Contents
You Can't Be Your Own Reference
Naming Yourself the Best Is the One Thing That Doesn't Count
The rest of the week, in bite-sized pieces
"We paid someone to write a 'Best [our service] in Erie' page with us listed first. Should we take it down?"
Epic Web Studios
Epic Insights
Edition 30  ·  Jul 27, 2026

You Can't Be Your Own Reference

Somewhere along the way, "publish a Best [Your Industry] in [Your Town] page and put yourself at number one" became standard marketing advice. It half works. Google's AI does find those pages and read them. It just has an awkward habit of citing your list and then recommending somebody else.
The Big Story

Naming Yourself the Best Is the One Thing That Doesn't Count

A study published earlier this summer by Lily Ray, who leads SEO strategy at Amsive, put a number on something that had been a hunch. Her team ran 100 "best software" searches through Google's AI answers across three separate dates. On the searches that produced an AI answer, brands' own self-promotional "best of" pages were cited hundreds of times. In roughly 69% of those cases, Google quoted the company's page and then recommended a competitor in the actual answer.

Read that again, because it's a strange outcome. The page did its job as a source. It just didn't do its job as an argument.

What Google's AI leans on instead, according to the same analysis, is material it reads as neutral: third-party roundups, community discussion, review sites, places where somebody who isn't you did the talking. Which lines up with how people have always worked. You can't be your own reference. When a customer asks who's good, the one voice that carries no weight is the business insisting it's the best.

One honest caveat. This study looked at business software searches, not service area businesses (SABs). The exact percentage almost certainly shifts for local service searches, and anyone who tells you otherwise is guessing. But the underlying behavior, trusting outside sources over self-description, is consistent enough across everything we see that it's worth acting on now rather than waiting for a local version of the study.

The practical version is unglamorous. Reviews from real customers. Mentions on pages you don't control. Listings and directories that actually have your details right. Pages that answer a real question instead of announcing an award you gave yourself.
What this means for your site
A page declaring you the best in your category is close to invisible as a credibility signal, whatever it does for your ego. What moves the needle is other people's pages saying it, and those are slower to build and much harder to fake.

Your move: Search your main service the way a customer would and read the whole AI answer. Note which sites it pulls from. If they're review sites, directories, or local roundups you're missing from, that list is your work for the next month.
Quick Hits

The rest of the week, in bite-sized pieces
Google Shuffled the Rankings Again and Said Nothing
Ranking trackers lit up over the weekend of July 18 and 19, the sort of movement that usually means Google changed something, and Google has confirmed nothing. Barry Schwartz noted the odd twist: the week before was actually choppier than the weekend everyone noticed.
Your move: If your traffic wobbled, wait two weeks before changing anything. This kind of movement usually settles on its own.
If Your Site Runs on WordPress, Last Week's Flaw Is Now Being Used
The WordPress flaw patched on July 17 has gone from theoretical to actively exploited, with attackers planting hidden backdoors on sites that weren't fixed in time. A separate page-builder plugin called Kirki is under attack too. This only affects WordPress sites, which is a small slice of what we manage.
Your move: On WordPress, confirm your version reads 6.9.5 or 7.0.2 or higher today and have someone check for admin accounts you don't recognize. If we manage your site, no worries, we got you.
AI Answers Just Reached the Last Major Market
On July 22, Google switched on its AI answers in France, the last big market without them. The rollout is finished. Whatever you think of the AI answer layer, it's no longer a test you can wait out.
Your move: Nothing urgent. Just stop treating "when AI search arrives" as a future event when budgeting for next year.
Search Console Now Shows Where AI Answers Use Your Pages
Google's Search Console has a report showing how often your pages turn up inside AI answers and AI Mode. It's impressions only, no clicks or search terms yet, so treat it as a rough visibility gauge rather than a scoreboard.
Your move: Take a look and note a baseline number so next quarter's has something to sit against. If we report for you, it's in your Client Center.
Ask Epic

"We paid someone to write a 'Best [our service] in Erie' page with us listed first. Should we take it down?"

You don't have to take it down, but stop expecting it to do the work someone sold you on.

A page like that has one honest use: it's a reasonable landing spot for people already comparing options, and it can be genuinely useful if it's fair about who else is good and why. What it won't do is convince a search engine you're the best, because the claim is coming from the one source with an obvious interest in the answer.

Picture a hiring manager reading a stack of references. Three come from former supervisors. One is written by the candidate about the candidate. The last one isn't fake exactly, it just doesn't count toward the decision.

So keep it if it's useful to a human being. Then put the actual effort into the things you can't write yourself: steady, honest reviews, accurate listings, and a mention or two on local pages you don't own. That's slower work, and it's the work that holds up. Happy to look at where the gaps are if you want a second set of eyes.
What Epic's doing for you this week
This week the team is reading the AI answers for client service searches and noting which third-party sites keep getting cited, since those are the pages worth being present on. We're also checking review counts and listing accuracy where they've drifted, keeping an eye on the weekend's ranking movement, and handling patching on the handful of WordPress sites we maintain. Anything that needs a decision from you, we'll come to you directly. Everything else is waiting in your Client Center.
Your 15-minute self-audit

The Third-Party Test

1. Ask the question your customer asks. Search your main service plus your town, on your phone, and read the whole AI answer top to bottom. Note every site it cites.

2. Sort what you find. Which of those sources mention you, which mention competitors but not you, and which have your information wrong? That middle group is the target list.

3. Count what's actually yours. Of everything vouching for you, how much lives on a page you control? If the answer is most of it, that's the imbalance to fix, and reviews are the fastest honest way to start.

Thanks for reading! Got questions? Ideas? I'm all ears. Share your thoughts with me and help shape future editions of Epic Insights.

— Kristy Freeman
Epic Web Studios
k.freeman@epicwebstudios.com
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