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.