On Sept. 30, 63 of 100 brand-name queries on Google returned an AI Overview, up from five of 98 on July 1. The weekly figures come from Ahrefs, which tracked U.S. results for the exact names of 100 global brands every week from July through September and published the data Oct. 2.

The sharpest jump landed between Sept. 9 and Sept. 30. The count went from 16 to 42 on Sept. 9 alone, then climbed to 46 by the checkpoint before Sept. 30 and reached 63 that day. Ahrefs says AI Overviews "vastly increased at the start of September."

This 100-brand panel is one of three separate measurements that converged in late September. Each used its own sample.

What do the other two counts show?

Chris Long, co-founder of Nectiv, ran a SerpApi scrape on Sept. 30 and reported that 93 of 100 enterprise brands had AI Overviews present. He warned on LinkedIn that "competitors/external sources can now control the narrative of your brand directly in the search results." Long did not publish the 100-brand list.

DemandSphere, publishing daily through Oct. 1, tracked branded keywords across "all markets, all devices" using its DemandMetrics platform. AI Overviews appeared on 26.12% of branded keywords Sept. 1, climbed to 90.48% on Sept. 27, then settled at 82.06% on Sept. 29. Before Sept. 26, the daily share had stayed below 60%. DemandSphere counts an AI Overview as present "regardless of whether brand itself is cited in the AIO."

How is the 83% headline figure different?

The 83% figure circulated in headlines came from a separate Ahrefs analysis, not the 100-brand panel. On Sept. 29, Ahrefs crawled U.S. desktop results and found AI Overviews on 82.91% of branded-keyword results — the round number in coverage. That crawl sits inside a much wider set: 92.5 million branded-keyword crawls drawn from 232.8 million U.S. desktop crawls between July and September.

Monthly branded-keyword averages from that broader set: 61.3% in July, 65.1% in August, 73.3% in September — a 12-percentage-point gain. Non-branded keywords rose 4.8 points to an average of 78.3% in September. Neither Ahrefs nor DemandSphere explains how it classifies a "branded" query.

Each crawl equals one results page collected by the vendor, not one user query. Ahrefs gives crawl counts without stating how many distinct keywords they represent.

Where did the AI Overviews sit on the page?

Of the 63 AI Overviews observed on Sept. 30, 48 sat in position one, eight in position two, two in position three, three in position four, and two in position six. None appeared in position five. The average position was 1.49, with a median of one. Ahrefs does not define how it numbers those positions.

What external sites did the answers cite?

From Sept. 16 to 29, Ahrefs captured source lists for 57 of the brand-name answers. Wikipedia, YouTube, and LinkedIn were the most frequently cited outside domains. YouTube and LinkedIn let brands run their own channels, though Ahrefs does not break out how many cited pages belonged to the brands themselves.

Out of 57 source lists, Ahrefs identified one verified competitor-owned website. Among 58 responses with full text accessible, two — 3.4% — discussed competitors directly: a Pepsi answer named Coca-Cola in the context of "cola wars," and an Intel answer named TSMC and Nvidia.

These citation counts show how often each domain appeared in a response. They do not show who shaped the wording or how accurate the information was.

What does this change for brand and SEO teams?

For brand teams, the panel reviewed the page users see when they type the company's exact name. The first practical check is to search your own brand name on Google and read the AI Overview along with the cited sources.

A single search produces a dated snapshot. Repeating the check on different days produces a dated record of what Google served for the name. A change in branded clicks alone does not reveal whether the cause was demand or an AI Overview, and late September is not a confirmed rollout date from Google.

For reporting, Google Search Console's branded queries filter — announced November 2025 and opened to all eligible sites in March — shows clicks, impressions, average position, and click-through rate for queries Google classifies as branded. Google's John Mueller said in March there was no way to add queries to the filter "at the moment" and that he was not "aware of plans to provide customization," so a vendor's keyword list cannot be mapped directly onto it.

Search Console's generative AI performance report, live globally since Aug. 31, shows how often a site's links appeared to users within AI Overviews and AI Mode. The report sorts by page, country, date, and device but has no query dimension, so brand-name searches cannot be isolated. Mentions without links don't register as impressions.

In Google Analytics 4, AI Overview visits still land in Organic Search. The new AI Assistant channel, launched in May, does not track these visits, so a brand-name AI Overview shows up in the same channel as a regular result.

What to watch next

DemandSphere says it is backfilling earlier months and preparing device- and market-level breakdowns. Until either vendor publishes more, or Google speaks to the late-September spike, the cleanest ongoing read is to check the results page for your own brand name on different days and to watch the branded filter for movement — a dated screenshot records what appeared at that moment, and a later check of the same query provides a comparison.