Google appears to be showing AI Overviews for many brand searches in the right column, the slot a Knowledge Panel used to hold. Chris Long, who flagged the layout on X on November 2, 2026, wrote that Google is “changing the way they’re showing AI Overviews for brand searches” and that, “Instead of a Knowledge Panel, they’re showing AI Overviews for brand terms in the right column.” Google has not announced the change.

Search Engine Roundtable, where Barry Schwartz documented the shift, used a search for [Apple] as its main example. Earlier AI Overviews on brand terms showed up at the top or in the middle of the main results. Schwartz added screenshots of other brand queries.

David McSweeney posted a similar observation on October 31, a couple of days before Long. McSweeney described AI Overviews “now generally in a right panel on desktop (or in some cases further down the page).” He also hedged: “Assuming it is a change, it’s a good one.” That hedge matters. Nobody outside Google has confirmed the scope, the start date, or whether every brand query is affected.

Schwartz gave a mixed verdict. He thinks the right column works much better than the main results, but he cautioned that trusting AI to describe a brand as well as the brand’s own website is not ideal. He described the change as, in effect, swapping brand Knowledge Panels for AI Overviews.

Analysis: what a right-column AI Overview means for brand SERPs

Everything below is our reading, not something Google or Search Engine Roundtable said.

Knowledge Panel real estate is the first issue. A Knowledge Panel is built from structured entity data, and brands could influence it by claiming it and correcting facts. A generated summary in the same slot is composed at query time. If the right column now carries a generated summary where a panel used to sit, the brand’s control over its most visible descriptive asset becomes less direct.

Brand-owned results are the second issue. The main column keeps its blue links, which means the brand’s homepage, social profiles, and owned properties still compete for the top organic positions. Moving the generated answer out of that column may reduce the chance that it pushes those links down the page. That is an inference from the layout description, and no click data has been published to test it.

The third issue is monitoring. A brand query can now return two descriptions of the same company: the owned results on the left and a generated summary on the right. When the two disagree, the summary is the one that carries Google’s presentation. Source reporting says nothing about how Google picks the content or which pages feed it, so any claim about citation sources would be a guess.

A practical check: search your brand and product names on desktop, and record where the AI Overview appears and what it says.

Brand teams should add the right-column AI Overview to their reputation and SERP monitoring this week, and log any factual errors it contains so they can be traced against the owned pages that should have prevented them.

Search Engine Roundtable, Barry Schwartz, drawing on posts by Chris Long and David McSweeney on X, published November 2, 2026.