When someone searches for your company by name, Google may now answer with an AI Overview as well as the usual links. We wanted to know how often that happens for established brands, and what the Overview actually says.
At the start of October, DemandSphere reported that AI Overviews were showing on far more of the branded searches it tracks: 26% on 1 September, a peak of 90% on 27 September, settling at 82% on 29 September, according to Scalevise's write-up of the data. Google had not announced a change when the report was published. We could not check the rise, because we have no 1 September reading of our own, but we could check the level.
What we checked
On 11 October 2026 we searched 40 brand names on Google, with the location set to the UK, English language and desktop settings: 20 travel companies, 10 cybersecurity firms and 10 consumer technology and retail brands. We searched each name on its own and again with "reviews" after it. That is 80 queries with one observation each, collected through SerpAPI, with every response saved.
How often an Overview appeared
36 of the 40 brand names returned an AI Overview on their own, which is 90%. With "reviews" added, 39 of 40 did. The split was much the same across sectors: 18 of 20 travel names, 9 of 10 cyber names and 9 of 10 consumer brands showed an Overview for the name alone.
Whether it was about the right company
Most were. Two of the Overviews for a bare brand name described something else entirely. A search for a major UK retailer's name returned an Overview about an American academic with a similar name, although the same retailer's "reviews" search was correctly about the retailer. A cybersecurity firm that shares its name with an animal got an Overview about the animal, with a one-line note at the end that the name also belongs to a security company. A third firm, whose name is also a historical term, got an Overview that covered both meanings, and its "reviews" search was summarised as reviews of unrelated venues with the same name.
Three more "reviews" searches were about the right company but answered a different question: for a technology company, a travel review site and a holiday-rental platform, the Overview mostly explained how reviews work on that platform (the holiday-rental one also quoted a Trustpilot score).
If your brand name is also a common word, a place or a person, it is worth checking which meaning Google settles on.
What the review summaries said
When someone searches your name with "reviews", the Overview tends to give a verdict. 27 of the 39 review Overviews quoted a numerical customer, product or employee rating, such as a Trustpilot or Feefo star rating, a Which? customer score or a recommendation percentage (we did not count scores for individual branches). Some were positive and some were not.
The cybersecurity results surprised us most. For 7 of the 9 cyber firms that had a review Overview, the summary included employee ratings, from sites such as Glassdoor, for example the share of staff who would recommend working there. The reviews summaries for these security suppliers included what employees say about working there.
The Overviews linked to a mix of sources. Across the 75 Overviews, Trustpilot was linked in 36, YouTube in 32, Reddit in 19 and Facebook in 18. Every one of the 39 review Overviews linked to at least one review platform or discussion forum, such as Trustpilot, Which?, Reddit or Tripadvisor. About two thirds (51 of 75) linked to a website belonging to the brand or its parent company.
What to do with this
- Search your brand name, and your name with "reviews", using the markets you sell in. Read the Overview the way a new customer would, and check it is about you.
- Look at the score it quotes and where that score comes from. If it is an employee rating or an old review profile, that is the source worth your attention.
- Make the basic facts about your business easy to find and consistent on your own site and the main profiles that describe you: what you do, where, for whom, and since when. We have not tested whether this changes what Google writes. These are simply the kinds of pages the Overviews most often linked to.
The limits of this snapshot
This is a small, chosen sample: 40 well-known brands, one location setting, one observation per query, on one day. It measures whether an Overview appeared and what it said, not where it sat on the page, whether anyone read it, or what happened to clicks. An Overview missing on one observation can appear on the next, so the four brand names without one are "not shown this time" rather than "never shown". And because we have no earlier reading, it says nothing about whether this level is new.
If you would like us to run the same check for your brand across your markets, get in touch.