AI Overviews Now Appear on 83% of Branded Searches
AI Overviews appeared in 82.91% of US desktop search results for branded keywords as of 29 September 2026, according to an analysis of 232.8 million Google search-result crawls collected between July and September. Monthly averages climbed from 61.3% in July to 65.1% in August and 73.3% in September, a 12 percentage point rise over the quarter.
The gap between branded and non-branded queries has narrowed sharply. Non-branded searches became more likely to trigger an AI Overview too, but by only 4.8 percentage points, leaving a five point difference between the two groups in September, down from 12.2 points in July.
A separate panel tracking exact brand-name queries for 100 companies found that 63 of them returned an AI Overview by 30 September, up from five at the start of July. In 48 of those 63 cases the AI Overview sat in position one, ahead of the brand's own site.
Wikipedia accounted for almost 72% of external citations in branded AI Overviews, with YouTube and LinkedIn the next most common sources. Only two of 58 answers mentioned a competitor by name, and just one competitor-owned site appeared across 57 source lists, so the immediate risk is less about rivals and more about third parties shaping how a brand is described.
Reported by Ahrefs Blog ↗
Topics: AI Overviews, Google Search, Citations