Google’s AI Overview has quietly moved from a niche feature to the front page of your brand. New Ahrefs tracking of 100 global brand names shows the shift is no longer a test: on July 1, only five usable results showed an AI Overview. By September 30, 63 of 100 exact brand-name searches did.
Brand SERPs now start with an AI answer
The panel searched each brand’s name alone, using brands from Interbrand’s Best Global Brands 2025. Most of the growth came in early September: the weekly count jumped to 42 on September 9 from 16 at the previous checkpoint, then reached 63 by month-end. Ahrefs recorded that 48 of the 63 overviews sat in position one, with an average position of 1.49 and a median of one.
Broader crawl data points the same way. Ahrefs’ larger branded-keyword set rose from 61.3% AI Overview coverage in July to 73.3% in September, a 12-point jump, while non-branded keywords rose only 4.8 points over the same period. DemandSphere’s daily tracking hit 90.48% on September 27 before easing to 82.06% two days later.
Who controls the story on your name?
The risk is not just a drop in blue links. Ahrefs found that among 57 AI Overviews with source lists, one cited a verified competitor-owned site, and two of 58 full-text answers directly discussed rivals—Pepsi’s answer mentioned Coca-Cola in the “cola wars,” and Intel’s response mentioned TSMC and Nvidia. The most cited outside domains were Wikipedia, YouTube, and LinkedIn.
"Competitors/external sources can now control the narrative of your brand directly in the search results."
That warning comes from Chris Long, co-founder of Nectiv, whose own scrape found 93 of 100 enterprise brands with AI Overviews present on September 30.
What brand teams should do now
- Search your exact company name on Google and note whether an AI Overview appears.
- Screenshot the response and every source it cites, with the date attached.
- Repeat on different days to build dated snapshots of changes.
- Open Search Console and review the branded queries filter for clicks, impressions, and CTR.
- Check which cited YouTube and LinkedIn pages your brand actually manages.
The Search Console branded filter is useful, but it has limits: it is available to top-level properties with enough volume, uses Google’s own definition of branded, and does not currently allow you to customize the query set. In Google Analytics 4, visits from brand-name AI Overviews still land in Organic Search; the newer AI Assistant channel does not capture them.
Dated screenshots close the gap. They give you a record of what Google showed at a specific moment, which you can compare with later checks—especially since Ahrefs notes there is no guarantee the current situation will hold.
Source: Search Engine Journal
