AI Overviews on brands: what changes for your visibility

In July 2025, only 5 out of 100 brands saw an AI Overview on their name. By the end of September, it was 63. In three months, Google rewrote the search results page for almost all major brands — and the phenomenon is arriving in Italy too.

Should you worry about AI Overviews for your brand?

Yes, and right away. AI Overviews are no longer a minor thing: they show up right on your company name page and can cite outside sources instead of your own site.

When someone searches for your company name on Google, they expect to find your site right at the top. Starting in September 2025, though, more and more often they first find an AI-generated box — the AI Overview , meaning the instant answer box that Google shows above traditional results. That box might cite Wikipedia, YouTube, LinkedIn, or other sites. Your site might not show up at all.

The topic is covered in depth in the cluster hub SEO and visibility for AI , which gathers all the analysis on how AI is changing organic search. Here we focus on a specific and urgent aspect: what happens when someone searches specifically for your name.

What really happened: the expansion numbers

In just three months, AI Overviews on global brands jumped from 5% to 63%. In Italy the growth has been just as rapid, with over half of searches already triggering the AI box.

Ahrefs tracked Google results every week for the exact names of 100 global brands, from July 1st to September 30th, 2025. On July 1st, only 5 brands out of 98 valid results had an AI Overview. By September 30th, it was 63 out of 100. The sharpest acceleration came in early September: on September 9th, the count jumped from 16 to 42 in just one week, as reported by Search Engine Journal .

Parallel data from DemandSphere, tracking branded keywords daily, showed 26% coverage on September 1st and 90% on September 27th. Different numbers because of different tracking methods, but the direction is the same: rapid growth concentrated in just a few weeks.

In Italy, SEOZoom analyzed over 30 million keywords in December 2025: 54.15% of searches already triggered an AI Overview box. In March 2025, at the official launch in Italy, the share was close to 1%. The growth over nine months has been vertical.

Who ends up cited in the AI box when they search for your name?

Wikipedia, YouTube, and LinkedIn are the most cited sources. Your site might not show up, while competitors or outside sources take up space in the answer.

Ahrefs analyzed the sources cited in AI Overviews for the 100 panel brands between September 16 and 29, 2025. Out of 57 responses with an available source list, the most cited external domains were Wikipedia, YouTube, and LinkedIn. Only one direct competitor site was identified among the sources. In two out of 58 cases (3.4%), the response explicitly mentioned a competitor in the text — for example, the response about Pepsi mentioned Coca-Cola when discussing the "cola wars".

This means the main risk isn't that the box will talk badly about you, but that it will talk about you using sources you don't control. If your Wikipedia page is incomplete, your YouTube channel is abandoned, or your LinkedIn page isn't up to date, those are the sources Google will use to build the answer about you.

Does being cited in the AI box really make a difference for clicks?

Yes, and the difference is huge. Brands cited inside the AI box get 35% more organic clicks than those that rank but aren't mentioned.

Seer Interactive analyzed 25.1 million impressions across 42 organizations in 2025. The result is clear: being mentioned inside the AI Overview box brings 35% more organic clicks compared to those who appear in traditional results but are not mentioned in the box. For paid clicks (Google Ads) the advantage jumps to 91%, as reported Search Engine Land .

The flip side: when the AI box is there but doesn't mention your site, clicks drop. Ahrefs measured a 58% drop in CTR (click-through rate, meaning how many people click on your result versus how many see it) for top-ranking sites when an AI Overview is present, compared to similar queries without an AI box. In April 2025 that same figure was -34.5%: the trend is getting worse.

The logic is simple: if Google already answers the question in the box, many users won't click on anything. But if the box cites your site as a source, that mention acts like a clear recommendation — and anyone wanting to dive deeper will click right on you. As we looked at in the article on AI Overviews at 43% and impact on organic SEO , traffic doesn't disappear: it gets redistributed between those who are cited and those who aren't.

Three concrete scenarios: what changes for an e-commerce, a professional firm, and a manufacturing company?

The impact varies by company type, but in all three cases, being present in the AI box is the variable that decides whether branded traffic goes up or down.

Illustrative examples: numbers are meant to show the reasoning, they are not real customer data.

For e-commerce, the stakes are high because branded traffic converts better than anything else: whoever searches for your name already knows who you are. Losing those clicks means losing the hottest prospects. For a professional firm, the risk is reputational: the box might feature a Google Maps review or a local press article. For B2B manufacturing, the danger is that the box cites an industry aggregator or distributor, shifting attention away from the official website.

Why everyone's talking about it now: is the Italian market already involved?

Yes. Google rolled out AI Overviews in Italy in March 2025 and in less than a year they already cover over half of all searches. The window to act before your competitors is closing fast.

The official launch of AI Overviews in Italy took place on March 26, 2025, along with eight other European countries, as documented by Search Engine Land . From that moment on, growth has been steady: from 1% in March to 11% in July, and up to 54% in December 2025, according to the study SEOZoom over 30 million Italian keywords.

The most selective data concerns sources: out of about 168 million domains visible on Google Italy, AI Overviews chose only 175,000 sites as sources. One in a thousand. Anyone who doesn't optimize today risks staying out of that selection for months.

What tools do I use to monitor AI Overviews for my brand?

Google Search Console already offers two specific reports. Pair them with regular manual checks and third-party tools to get a complete picture.

Google has made two native tools available. The first one is branded query filter in Search Console, launched in November 2025 and rolled out to all eligible sites in March 2026: it shows clicks, impressions, average position, and CTR for queries Google classifies as branded. The second is the generative AI report , available globally from August 2025, which shows how many times your pages appeared as a source in AI Overviews. As explained in the article on Google auto-expanding AI Overviews and organic CTR , these data need to be read together to understand the real impact.

One big limit: the generative AI report doesn't show the exact searches that brought up your impressions. You know your homepage popped up in an AI box, but you don't know if it was for a branded or generic search. That's why checking manually—searching your name on Google and looking at the box—is still a must.

How to actually get started: the steps to protect your brand's visibility?

It starts with a three-hour audit, then we work on the content and sources that Google tends to cite. No step requires an advertising budget.

What are the most common mistakes people make when tackling brand AI Overviews?

The first mistake is not checking. The second is optimizing only the website while ignoring external sources that Google prefers to cite.

Many companies only find out about the issue when branded traffic drops. At that point, recovering takes weeks, because Google updates its answers gradually. As we saw in the analysis on SEO without Google index and AI visibility , the logic of generative AI rewards those already present across multiple authoritative sources — not just those with a good website.

Another common mistake: confusing impressions in the generative AI report with actual clicks. Google counts an impression even when your site is mentioned in the box but the user doesn't click. CTR (click-through rate) is the metric that really matters.

How to tell if the actions you are taking are working?

Three metrics are enough to know if you're on the right track: branded CTR, impressions in the generative AI report, and how often your site appears as a source in the box.

As explained in the article on Google Discover and Topic Overviews , visibility signals in the AI era need to be read across multiple channels together. For branded AI Overviews, the minimum dashboard to monitor is this:

So, is it worth investing time in this topic for your company?

It is worth it if you have a brand with significant name searches, you want to protect your most qualified traffic (those searching for your name are already interested), and you have an internal resource or agency that can work on content and external sources.

A middle ground you are an SMB with a local brand and few monthly name searches: the risk is real but less urgent. Start with manual verification and turn on Search Console reports, then figure out if you need a more structured fix.

Not yet if your brand is very new, has very few searches by name, and you don't yet have an established presence on Wikipedia, YouTube, or LinkedIn. In this case, building that presence first is the priority.

How we see it at SHM

For us, the expansion of AI Overviews for brands confirms something we've been saying for a while: SEO is no longer just about Google rankings. It's about who controls the narrative when someone searches for your name. If that AI box quotes Wikipedia instead of your site, it is not a technical problem — it is a perceived authority problem.

We believe AI should be integrated as a tool to give companies back control, not take it away. This means working on AI-optimized SEO in a structured way: don't chase every Google update, but build a steady presence across all the sources that generative systems tend to favor. It also means using the data you have—Search Console, Analytics, third-party tools—to make smart choices, not just stress over the algorithm.

If you want to understand where your brand stands today in AI Overviews and what to do to improve it, the starting point is an audit. We work on Strategic AI integration and on websites optimized for generative search . Write to us from the page contacts let's chat with zero pressure.

Frequently Asked Questions

The real question is not whether AI Overviews will appear for your brand — it has already happened. The question is who is telling your story instead of you.