AI Overviews are taking over branded search – what does that mean for brands?

If someone types your organisation’s name directly into their search bar, you’d expect your website to be both the top result and the first place they’ll then go to learn about your brand. 

Increasingly, you’d be wrong.

Google is showing AI Overviews on more branded searches, putting an AI-generated summary between your audience and your website.

That means that your website ranking first for your own brand name is no longer enough. You need to understand and influence what Google’s AI Overview is saying about you before someone clicks through to your site, if they do at all.

Let’s look at the data.

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AI Overviews are becoming much more common on branded searches

Ahrefs analysed 233 million Google search results on US desktops between July and September 2026. In July, AI Overviews appeared on an average 61% of branded searches. By 29 September, that had risen to 83%. 

DemandSphere picked up the same trend with a different dataset. At the beginning of September, about 26% of their tracked branded keywords returned an AI Overview. By September 27, that figure peaked at 90%. 

The direction is clear: AI Overviews are moving rapidly into branded search.

That changes something marketers have taken for granted in the past. Someone searching specifically for your organisation may now see Google’s explanation of you before they see your own.

Ranking first doesn’t guarantee a click

AI Overviews significantly change click behaviour.

Advanced Web Ranking looked at US searches and found that:

• On desktop, searches without an AI Overview, the websites ranking first and second received a combined 29% click-through rate. When an AI Overview appeared, that dropped to just 10%.
• On mobile, the first result dropped from a 36% CTR without an AI Overview to an 8.5% CTR with one.

This research covers searches generally, rather than branded searches specifically, so we can’t assume branded clicks have fallen by the same amount. It’s clear, however, that a #1 ranking doesn’t command the attention it used to whenever an AI Overview sits above it.

Once again the questions for brands switches from “do we rank first for our name?” to “what are AI Overviews saying about our brand?”

Google is learning about you from more than your website

This is where branded search gets particularly interesting.

Ahrefs looked at the sources appearing in AI Overviews for 100 major brands. Among the AI Overviews with external citations:

• Wikipedia appeared in 71.9%
• YouTube appeared in 38.6%
• LinkedIn appeared in 22.8%

Our own research points in the same direction. When we analysed AI visibility across 86 UK energy organisations, we found that LinkedIn was the most commonly cited third-party source, appearing in 15.3% of AI responses. Reddit, YouTube, Wikipedia, and government websites also appeared regularly.

In other words, Google is increasingly pointing people towards other places to find information about your organisation by surfacing third-party sites as citations alongside its AI Overview. Those citations aren’t a transparent record of the sources Google used to generate the answer – but they are supporting links that direct users towards places to explore the topic further.

In particular, it’s using third-party sources to fill the gaps when your services pages aren’t clear, current, or consistent enough to answer questions about your brand. 

What this means for your branded search strategy

You don’t need to rethink everything you do because an AI Overview appears above your website. You do, however, need to start looking beyond search rankings and the indicator of your organic search strategy’s success.

Key takeaways:

• Check what Google actually says about you. Search your organisation’s name and the branded questions your audiences are likely to ask. Does the AI Overview understand what you do? Is anything important missing? Is the information still accurate?
• Look at what Google is retrieving to build the answer. Monitoring retrievals can show which pages and sources are being used to inform an AI Overview. Don’t rely on citations for this, they show where Google is directing users to learn more, not where the answer itself came from.
• Measure representation as well as rankings. Clicks and traffic still matter, but they don’t show the whole search experience anymore. It becomes useful to track whether you appear, how you’re described, and which sources are shaping that description.

Find out what AI is saying about your brand

Our AI Performance Analyser shows how your organisation is being discovered, understood, and represented across AI search – and where there are opportunities to optimise your website and broader digital presence for AI search tools. 

Book a strategic workshop with exceptional™ to talk about your AI discoverability.