Half of searches for big UK brands now show an AI Overview

Google has been adding AI Overviews to searches for brand names at speed, and has not announced it. DemandSphere, which checks branded keywords once a day across all markets and devices combined, found an overview on 26.12 per cent of the branded keywords it tracks on 1 September and on 90.48 per cent on 27 September. Ahrefs analysed 232.8 million US desktop Google results pages from July to September, 92.5 million of them for branded keywords, and found the monthly share of branded keywords with an overview rose from 61.3 per cent in July to 73.3 per cent in September. Of 100 global brand names it searched each week, 63 returned an overview on 30 September, against 5 of 98 on 1 July.

The studies disagree on where the overview sits. Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable found it lower down the page in most of the examples he checked on 30 September, while Ahrefs' 100-brand sample put 48 of 63 overviews in first position. None of these studies gave UK figures, so we took our own.

Fintech, telecoms and energy brands were the most likely to get a summary. Monzo, Revolut, Wise and Zopa got one in every search, as did BT, Virgin Media, giffgaff, Octopus Energy, Scottish Power and So Energy. Admiral, Direct Line and Compare the Market did too.

High-street names were the least likely. Tesco, Sainsbury's and Morrisons never got one, and neither did Greggs, Pret A Manger, Nando's, Wagamama, B&Q or Screwfix. Sectors were not uniform. Starling Bank got none while the other four fintech names got one in every search, Aviva got none while Admiral, Direct Line and Compare the Market got one every time, and Deliveroo got one in all three searches while every restaurant chain got none.

Google has not said when it shows an overview for a brand. Our reading of the pattern: names people search to shop or find a branch already get what they need from the website link, the store finder and shopping results, while names people look up to judge, such as a mobile network, a money app, an insurer or an energy supplier, are where Google adds a summary.

Nineteen of the 50 names changed between searches made minutes apart. Barclays got an overview in the first search and not in the next two. Asda got one only in the second, and Sky, Argos and Trainline got one in the second and third but not the first. The variation has no published explanation, so search your own brand name several times before drawing a conclusion.

Across the 78 overviews, Google cited the brand's own website in 71. The outside sources it used most were Wikipedia (31 overviews), Trustpilot (26), LinkedIn (16), the comparison site Uswitch (12), Facebook (11) and YouTube (10). Comparison sites followed the market: GoCompare was cited in 10 overviews, all for energy suppliers, and Uswitch mostly for telecoms.

That puts a brand's Wikipedia entry and review pages into the first thing many searchers read about it. Ahrefs found the same tilt in the US: in its 100-brand sample, Wikipedia was cited in 41 of the 57 overviews whose sources it could see.

Search your brand name on Google UK in a private window a few times, then the name with "reviews" and "pricing", and note whether an overview appears and which pages it cites. Our free AI Overview checker runs the same search from a clean UK browser and lists the cited pages.

If a summary is wrong or thin, fix the sources it draws on. Reply to reviews on your Trustpilot profile, keep your LinkedIn and Facebook company pages current, check your comparison-site listings, and propose corrections to a Wikipedia entry on its talk page, since Wikipedia strongly discourages people from editing articles about their own company.

Since 31 August every site has a setting in Search Console that decides whether its pages can appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode. Include is the default, and choosing Exclude removes your own pages from the summary while the third-party pages about you stay. For how Google chooses the sources for these summaries, see our Google AI Overviews tracker page.

We chose the 50 brands before taking any reading: five household names in each of ten sectors, typed as a shopper types them, such as "Marks and Spencer" and "B&Q". Each name was searched three times on Google UK, logged out, between 17:07 and 17:18 UK time on 6 October 2026, through the same collection our AI Overview checker uses. None of the 150 searches failed. The download has every reading and every domain each overview cited.