AI Overviews now appear for 93% of large brand-name queries tested, according to a spot-check of roughly 100 brands shared by Chris Long on X — the clearest signal yet that Google has expanded the feature into navigational queries it previously avoided.

Long tested a list of major brands and found AI Overviews triggering for Reddit, Salesforce, Amazon, Adobe and many others. "Google is starting to show AI Overviews for a ton of branded queries," he wrote. "Reddit, Salesforce, Amazon, Adobe + many more. 93% of the brands I tested have AI Overviews appearing."

That 93% figure comes from Long's sample, not from any Google statement. Google has not confirmed a specific expansion of AI Overviews to branded queries, so treat the finding as tool-and-practitioner signal rather than an official change. That said, independent spot-checks support the pattern: repeated manual searches for major brand names return AI Overviews in most cases right now.

Not every brand triggers one

Two categories stand out as exceptions. AI Overviews do not appear for Google's own brand name, and they largely do not appear for news publications — at least for now.

Smaller brands are also uneven. RustyBrick, a small business brand, shows no AI Overview, while Search Engine Roundtable does — likely, as Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable notes, because the site has a knowledge-panel-style search profile attached to it. That distinction matters for site owners: the expansion so far skews toward brands with established entity presence.

Where the AI Overview sits on the page

Placement varies, and that variation is the most operationally significant detail in the data.

Most examples show the AI Overview appearing mid-page or lower — below the main company's official result — rather than at the top of the search results page. Wikipedia's AI Overview, for instance, sits well down the page. Adobe is an exception: its AI Overview shows at the top of Google's results for the brand name.

For brands, mid-page placement is materially different from top placement. An AI Overview sitting above a company's own homepage directly competes for navigational clicks — users searching "Adobe" mostly want Adobe's site. Mid-page placement intercepts fewer of those clicks, which is why Schwartz writes he minds the mid-page cases far less than he would placements above the main company snippet.

A two-year arc, accelerating

Long flagged a similar branded-query pattern roughly two years ago, but the context has changed substantially. AI Overviews now trigger across a far wider set of queries overall than they did then, so brand-name coverage reaching 93% in a practitioner sample fits the broader trajectory of expansion rather than an isolated anomaly.

The sample size remains small — about 100 brands — and the method is manual testing, so the 93% figure is directional, not a measured share of all queries. It does not distinguish desktop versus mobile, logged-in versus logged-out, or geographic variation, all of which can affect AI Overview triggering.

What this means by site type

For large consumer and enterprise brands — the Reddits, Salesforces and Adobes of the sample — the immediate implication is a new mid-page content block competing for attention on queries where the brand previously owned nearly the entire result set. Brands whose AI Overview sits above their own result, as Adobe's does, face a more direct click-interception risk.

For news publishers, the current absence of AI Overviews on brand queries is a reprieve, not a guarantee. For small businesses without strong entity signals, RustyBrick's case suggests the feature may simply not trigger yet — but that could change as coverage widens.

What to watch

Monitor whether mid-page placements migrate upward on branded queries, whether news publications and smaller brands begin triggering AI Overviews, and whether Google issues any confirmation of expanded AI Overview triggering criteria. The next practitioner sample tracking placement position and brand category over time will show whether this is a staged rollout or a stable new default.