In September Google began showing AI Overviews on most searches for brand names. Branded clicks are about to fall for reasons that have nothing to do with demand, and the dashboards most B2B teams use to read awareness will not tell the difference.
Branded search has long been one of the few demand signals B2B marketers trusted. When an awareness campaign, an event or a piece of analyst coverage landed, more people typed the company's name into Google and clicked through. Branded organic sessions went into the board deck as a proxy for mindshare, and branded paid search was usually the cheapest conversion line in the account.
Over the past month the ground moved under that signal. Ahrefs, analysing 232.8 million US desktop results pages from July to September, found that the share of branded queries showing a Google AI Overview rose from 61.3% in July to 73.3% in September, reaching 82.9% on 29 September. In a panel of 100 of the world's largest brands searched by name alone, Overviews appeared on 5 queries on 1 July and on 63 by 30 September. In three-quarters of those cases the Overview sat in first position. DemandSphere, tracking client keywords across markets and devices, reported a jump from 26% of branded keywords on 1 September to 90% on 27 September. Google has not announced the change or said whether it is permanent.
The summary of your brand isn't written from your site
Ahrefs examined the sources Google cited in 57 of the branded Overviews. Wikipedia appeared in 71.9% of them, YouTube in 38.6% and LinkedIn in 22.8%. Competitors were rarely mentioned: two Overviews out of 58 named a rival. So the first answer a searcher now sees after typing a company's name is assembled mostly from pages the company does not control and often does not maintain.
For a global consumer brand with a long, well-tended Wikipedia article, that may be harmless. For a mid-market B2B vendor the picture is different. Its Wikipedia entry may be thin, out of date or missing. Its LinkedIn company page was written for recruiters. The YouTube video Google picks may be a customer's conference talk from three years ago. Those pages are now, in effect, the brand's search listing.
Branded search used to count the people who came looking for you. It now counts the ones who still needed to click after Google had described you.
What happens to the dashboard
Several numbers will move, and none of them will mean quite what it used to.
Branded organic clicks and click-through rates will fall for brands that now carry an Overview, even where interest is flat or rising. An earlier Ahrefs study found the top-ranking page received 58% fewer clicks when an Overview was present. No figure specific to branded queries has been published yet, but the direction is not in much doubt.
Direct traffic is likely to rise, because some people who read the Overview will type the address or come back later through a bookmark. Attribution models that treat "direct" as unexplained, or credit it to existing pipeline, will quietly absorb part of what used to be branded search.
Branded paid search may look more or less efficient depending on where the ad sits relative to the Overview, which makes period-on-period comparisons from late September onward unreliable unless the change is annotated.
The number that should hold is impressions. Branded impressions in Search Console still reflect how many people searched for the company. Clicks now reflect something else as well.
Figure 1
Metric | What it used to indicate | What it indicates now | Treat it as |
|---|---|---|---|
Branded impressions (Search Console) | Search interest in the brand | Search interest in the brand | Primary demand proxy |
Branded organic clicks | Interest and intent to visit | Interest, minus people satisfied by the Overview | Engagement, not demand |
Branded click-through rate | Listing quality | Largely whether an Overview appears | Diagnostic only |
Direct sessions | Returning users, offline influence | Also displaced branded searchers | Read alongside branded clicks |
Branded paid CTR and cost per acquisition | Efficiency on high-intent traffic | Sensitive to Overview placement | Re-baseline from late September |
Branded search metrics, before and after the Overview. Editorial guidance, not a measurement standard. The underlying data is US desktop; mobile and other markets may differ.
What marketing operations can do this quarter
Annotate the date. Any trend line for branded search should mark late September, so that a fall in clicks is not presented to leadership as a fall in demand. If the finance team already tracks branded sessions, explain the change before the quarterly review rather than during it.
Move the awareness measure to impressions and report clicks separately, as engagement. The gap between the two lines is itself worth tracking: it is a rough measure of how much of your brand's search demand Google is now satisfying on its own page.
Search your own company name and read the Overview, then do the same for product names and the queries buyers use late in an evaluation. The Ahrefs panel tested bare brand names only, so whether Overviews now sit on "[vendor] pricing" or "[vendor] reviews" is something to check directly rather than assume. Note which sources Google cites.
Then treat those sources as media you depend on but do not own. A company should not edit its own Wikipedia article; the site's conflict-of-interest guideline discourages it, and the accepted route is to propose changes on the article's talk page with independent sources. The LinkedIn company page and the company's own YouTube channel are a different matter. Both are fully in the company's control, and both are now candidate inputs to the first answer anyone sees about it.
None of this requires deciding whether AI Overviews are good or bad for B2B brands. It requires accepting that a metric which used to describe the buyer now partly describes Google's interface, and changing what goes into the board deck accordingly.
Sources and notes. Ahrefs, analysis of AI Overviews on branded searches, published 2 October 2026 (Ryan Law, with Xibeijia Guan): 232.8 million US desktop results pages, July–September 2026 (92.5 million branded); monthly branded Overview rates of 61.3%, 65.1% and 73.3%; daily rate of 82.91% on 29 September; 100-brand panel drawn from Interbrand's Best Global Brands 2025 (5 of 98 usable queries on 1 July, 63 of 100 on 30 September; 48 of 63 in position one); citation shares from the 57 Overviews with source lists; competitor mentions in 2 of 58 Overviews with full text. The 58% click-through reduction is from an earlier Ahrefs study. DemandSphere figures (26.12% on 1 September, 90.48% on 27 September, 82.06% on 29 September) are from its September 2026 analysis; sample size not published. First reported by Search Engine Roundtable (30 September). Google has made no public statement on the change; no click-through data specific to branded queries has been published. MarketingHubMedia has no commercial relationship with any firm named. Journalism, not procurement advice. Corrections welcome.
