AI Overviews Cover 63 Out of 100 Searches for Top Brands
Ahrefs tracked AI Overviews in 63 out of 100 searches for major brand names on Google in the US by the end of September, compared to just 5 at the beginning of July.
Ahrefs, an SEO tools company, tracked the appearance of AI Overviews in US Google results for 100 global brands selected from Interbrand's Best Global Brands 2025 list. It tracked their standalone names weekly from July through September and published the results on October 2. Overviews appeared in 5 out of 98 usable results in early July, then jumped to 16 before September 9, 42 on September 9, and 63 on September 30.
Looking at result rankings on September 30, 48 of the 63 overviews ranked first, with an average position of 1.49. In citation data from September 16 to 29, source lists appeared in 57 overviews, with Wikipedia appearing in 41, YouTube in 22, LinkedIn in 13, Yahoo Finance in 9, Facebook in 6, and Walmart in 4. Only a single website owned by a competitor appeared across all 57 lists.
The study does not measure clicks on these queries or how often the brand's own site is cited, nor does the citation count reveal who phrased the answer or whether its information is accurate. In a broader set of branded keywords, Ahrefs observed the proportion of keywords triggering AI Overviews rise from 61.3% in July to 65.1% in August and 73.3% in September, a jump of nearly 12 percentage points in three months.
This shift means a growing portion of the search journey is completed without a click to the brand's website, making its visibility in answers dependent on third-party sources like Wikipedia and YouTube rather than its own pages. For marketers and publishers in the Arab region, the practical takeaway is that shaping what is said about a brand across these sources has become a core element of search visibility strategy, rather than a secondary SEO task.
What Do These Terms Mean?
AI Overviews: Concise answers generated by AI that appear at the top of Google search results, summarizing information from multiple websites instead of displaying only links.
Citation: A reference within an AI answer to a website or page whose content was used to construct the answer, representing the actual point of visibility for the brand.
Branded Keyword: A search phrase containing the brand name itself, such as searching directly for a company name instead of searching for a general product.
Search Ranking: The position of a result within a search engine results page, with the first position being the highest and most visible to users.
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