Ahrefs: AI Overviews now appear on 83% of branded searches
AI Overviews appeared in 82.91% of US desktop Google results for branded keywords as of September 29, up from a monthly average of 61.3% in July to 73.3% in September, Ahrefs’ Ryan Law and Xibeijia Guan wrote, based on an analysis of 232.8 million search crawls. An earlier Ahrefs study found just 13.1% coverage in November 2025. Of the branded AI Overviews Ahrefs sampled, 76.2% appeared in the page’s first position, ahead of the brand’s own website, and Wikipedia was the most-cited external source (71.9%), followed by YouTube (38.6%) and LinkedIn (22.8%).
Why it matters: Branded search was the query type a company could count on owning outright; at three-quarters coverage and most of those boxes sitting in the top slot, that assumption is breaking down for large brands faster than for search overall.
The record: AhrefsGoogle AI OverviewsGoogle
Glossary: AI Overviews
Via Ahrefs Blog ↗
Posted to the wire October 2, 2026. Edited by Joe Balewski.