Ahrefs reports that AI Overviews appeared on 82.91% of US desktop branded-keyword SERPs in its crawl data as of September 29, 2026. That makes a generated answer the near-default result for people searching a brand by name. The question for brand teams is who writes that answer.

This updates our earlier report on Chris Long’s check of roughly 100 brands, which Search Engine Roundtable covered. The Ahrefs study, written by Ryan Law with Xibeijia Guan and published October 2, 2026, rests on a much larger dataset.

The dataset and the trend. The dataset spans 232.8 million crawls of Google results pages, all US desktop, collected between July and September 2026. Branded keywords account for 92.5 million of them, and non-branded keywords for 140.2 million. The 82.91% figure is a point-in-time reading for September 29. Monthly averages are lower: 61.3% of branded keywords triggered an AI Overview in July, 65.1% in August, and 73.3% in September.

That is a 12-percentage-point rise for branded searches across the period, which Ahrefs says equals about a fifth more than July’s rate. Non-branded keywords moved from 73.5% to 74.7% to 78.3% over the same months, a gain of 4.8 percentage points. The difference separating branded from non-branded narrowed to 5 points in September, down from 12.2 points in July.

Ahrefs contrasts this with its own November 2025 research on AI Overview triggers, which found them far more common for non-branded queries. It notes the two samples differ, so the comparison is directional, not exact.

Position one, in a separate panel. The position data comes from a different sample: a panel of 100 brands taken from the Interbrand 2025 Best Global Brands ranking, with exact-name queries checked weekly across July to September (14 checkpoints in all). These are bare brand names, not every search that contains a brand.

On September 30, 63 of those 100 names triggered an AI Overview. On July 1, only five of 98 usable results did. Forty-eight of the 63 held the top slot (76.2%), and the mean placement across all 63 was 1.49. Ahrefs adds that Google could move them lower later.

Who gets cited. In the same panel, Ahrefs counted external citations, meaning links to sites other than the brand being searched. Wikipedia appeared in 41 AI Overviews (71.9%), YouTube in 22 (38.6%), LinkedIn in 13 (22.8%), Yahoo Finance in 9 (15.8%), Facebook in 6 (10.5%), and Walmart in 4 (7.0%). The shares are per AI Overview, so they overlap.

Competitors showed up rarely. Among 58 AI Overviews with readable full text, two (3.4%) named rival brands in the answer. Pepsi’s entry mentioned Coca-Cola, and Intel’s mentioned TSMC and NVIDIA. Ahrefs could view 57 source lists and found a single verified rival-owned site in them.

Chris Long wrote on LinkedIn that “competitors/external sources can now control the narrative of your brand directly in the search results.” Ann Smarty raised a related worry about cited videos, noting the videos came from accounts other than the brand’s own and “may very well include outdated product information.”

Read it with the limits in mind. Ahrefs sells SEO tools, including the Site Explorer and Brand Radar products it points readers to for tracking this. The data covers US desktop only, and the branded and non-branded categories are Ahrefs’ own definitions. The source does not include a Google response. Ahrefs itself says Google changes AI Overview triggers routinely and that nothing guarantees the pattern holds.

What it means for brand teams. A brand that ranks first for its own name can now sit under an answer it did not write. The study suggests that answer leans on Wikipedia, YouTube, and LinkedIn, and the latter two give a brand far less control than its own pages. Ahrefs calls Wikipedia a fairly neutral source for most brands.

Teams should check which of their branded queries trigger an AI Overview, read what it says, and list every cited domain. Then they can correct the Wikipedia entry where it is wrong, and review YouTube videos and LinkedIn pages about the brand that they do not own. Branded click-through reports that blend AI Overview and non-AI Overview queries will hide the effect, so split them.

Ahrefs, in a study by Ryan Law with Xibeijia Guan published October 2, 2026, titled “AI Overviews Currently Appear for 83% of Branded Searches.”