That prompted us to investigate AI Overviews for branded searches on a larger scale.
We found that AI Overviews now appear for 83% of branded queries, potentially reducing clicks to brands’ own websites and giving third-party sources like Wikipedia, YouTube and LinkedIn a bigger say in how a brand appears in search results.
AI Overviews currently appear for 83% of branded queries
We analyzed 232.8 million US desktop Google search-result crawls from July to September 2026, consisting of 92.5 million branded-keyword crawls and 140.2 million non-branded-keyword crawls.
As of September 29th 2026, AI Overviews appeared in 82.91% of the US desktop search results for branded keywords. Looking at monthly averages, 73.3% of branded keywords triggered AI Overviews, up from 65.1% in August and 61.3% in July.
That’s a 12-percentage-point increase for branded searches between July and September, equivalent to roughly 20% growth relative to July’s rate.
Non-branded searches also became more likely to show an AI Overview, but their increase was smaller: 4.8 percentage points over the same period.
In our previous research on AI Overview triggers in November 2025, we found that AI Overviews were vastly more common for unbranded queries than for branded queries. That is clearly no longer the case. The gap between the two groups narrowed from 12.2 percentage points in July to just 5 points in September.
Here’s a direct comparison between our findings one year ago and today (albeit with different samples):
76.2% of branded AI Overviews appeared in position one
AI Overviews can appear in multiple positions in the SERP, and although our research suggests AI Overviews universally reduce click-through rates, the worst impact occurs when AI Overviews appear in position one for your brand query—instead of your domain.
So we also checked the search results for exact-name queries of 100 brands (selected from Interbrand’s Best Global Brands 2025) at 14 weekly checkpoints between July and September.
This is a separate sample from our broader branded-keyword research: it covers bare brand names (like “bluehost”), rather than every kind of search containing a brand.
The appearance of AI Overviews vastly increased at the start of September; by September 30, 63 of the 100 brand-name queries had an AI Overview, compared with just five among 98 usable results at the July 1 checkpoint.
More importantly, of the 63 AI Overviews in our sample, 48 appeared in position one (76.2%), with an average position of 1.49.
It’s possible that Google will choose to move these AI Overviews lower in the SERP, but from our recent research, it seems that they largely inhabit the top ranking spot for a brand’s keyword—instead of the brand’s own website.
Wikipedia, YouTube and LinkedIn are the most common external citations for branded AI Overviews
Perhaps the greatest risk of AI Overviews triggering for branded queries is directing users to unofficial sources of information or, in the worst case, competing brands.
In our same panel of 100 brands, most external citations (from websites other than the brand queried) linked to Wikipedia, YouTube, and LinkedIn.
Wikipedia is, at least, a fairly neutral source of information for most brands, and it leads the pack at almost 72% of external citations. YouTube and LinkedIn are both platforms that make it much harder for brands to influence and control the narrative—certainly much, much harder than owned pages on owned domains.
Here’s an example of YouTube being heavily cited in an AI Overview for Bluehost:
There is some small good news. Of those AI Overviews where we could see the full AI Overview text, only two of 58 answers (3.4%) explicitly discussed competitors: Pepsi’s answer named Coca-Cola in its description of the “cola wars”, while Intel’s named TSMC and NVIDIA.
And looking at citations in the AI Overviews, only one verified competitor-owned website appeared across 57 available source lists. It seems these AI Overviews are at least smart enough to avoid sourcing information from competing brands.
Why this matters for brands
Instead, as Chris Long explained on LinkedIn, “competitors/external sources can now control the narrative of your brand directly in the search results.”Ann Smarty raised a similar concern about videos cited in the answers, noting that they weren’t from the brand’s official account and “may very well include outdated product information.”
Google routinely changes the appearance and triggers of AI Overviews, and there’s no guarantee that the situation we’ve shown here will remain; however, Google seems hell-bent on inserting AI Overviews into any SERP that will tolerate them, so I suspect we will have to deal with AI Overviews appearing on branded queries for the foreseeable future.
How to track your brand’s appearance in AI Overviews
To see which branded keywords trigger an AI Overview for your website, head to Site Explorer and click the Organic Keywords report. In the Intents drop-down menu, select Branded Keywords. Then click Add Filter, select SERP features, and click AI Overviews.
Click “Show Results”, and you’ll see a list of all the branded keywords that your domain ranks for that also contain an AI Overview in the search results (like, in this example, Bluehost’s brand name and login pages).
If you’d like to explore the contents of these AI Overviews to see whether competitors are mentioned and which domains are cited, head to Brand Radar. Enter your brand, and we’ll automatically suggest relevant competitors and competing domains to track.
Head to the AI responses report and filter results to see the AI Overviews where your brand is mentioned:
Click Apply, and you’ll be shown a list of AI Overviews and their contents, along with the brands and domains that are mentioned and cited within them.