Search your business name on Google. There's a good chance the first thing you see isn't your homepage. It's a paragraph Google wrote about you, stitched together from sources you didn't choose.
That's a recent change. In November 2025, Ahrefs found AI Overviews on 13.1% of branded searches. By September 2026, the figure was 73.3%.
Most owners haven't read it closely. This audit takes about 30 minutes and needs a browser, a spreadsheet, and Google Search Console. If branded search is new to you, start with our beginner's guide to branded SEO.
Why your brand searches need a check-up now
Someone who types your name into Google already knows you exist. They're about to buy, book, or call.
Fewer of them click through, though. A Pew Research Center study of 900 US adults found they clicked a traditional search result on 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared, and 15% when it didn't. Just 1% of visits ended with a click on a link inside the summary.
People are also asking AI tools directly. BrightLocal's Local Consumer Review Survey 2026 found 45% of consumers now use ChatGPT and similar tools for local recommendations, up from 6% the year before.
“8% vs 15%. How often people clicked a regular search result with and without an AI summary on the page. (Pew Research Center, 2025)”
What it means: for many potential customers, Google's summary is the entire first impression. If it's wrong, stale, or built on a two-year-old complaint, they won't see the business you'd want them to see. We've covered the wider traffic shift in how Google AI Overviews are changing SEO. This is about something narrower: what Google says about you.
The searches to audit (your brand name is only the start)
Ahrefs' panel tracked bare names of 100 global brands. People don't search for small businesses that way. They add a word. "Reviews." "Pricing." "Legit." That word changes which sources Google pulls from.
SE Ranking analyzed 30,000 keywords and found 49% of AI Overviews for explicit review searches cited a review platform, against 17.1% for "best" or "top" searches. Comparisons are even more exposed. In Seer Interactive's 2026 CTR study, 95.4% of comparison queries triggered an AI Overview.
What to do
Start with real data. Search Console added a branded queries filter in November 2025 and opened it to all eligible sites on March 11, 2026. In the Performance report, switch to the Branded view and sort by impressions. Your top 10 to 15 queries go on the list.
No filter for your property yet? Use "Filter by query" with your brand name.
Then add the searches people run right before they buy:
- [brand] reviews
- [brand] pricing
- is [brand] legit
- [brand] vs [main competitor]
- [brand] alternatives
- [brand] [city], or [brand] hours
- [brand] complaints
Around 20 searches is enough to spot patterns and still finish in one sitting.
How to run the check so the results hold up
AI Overviews aren't fixed. Google says its AI features use a "query fan-out" technique, running several related searches before writing an answer. Results also shift with location, device, and sign-in status.
What to do
- Use a private window and stay signed out of Google.
- Search from where your customers are. For a local business, that's your city.
- Check desktop and mobile.
- Screenshot every result and note the date.
- For your top three queries, open the AI Mode tab too.
- Repeat on the same day each month.
The brand AI Overview scorecard
This is the heart of the audit. One spreadsheet row per search, with these columns:
Column | What to record | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
AI Overview? | Yes or no, and where it sits | Tells you whether the rest of the row applies |
Accurate? | Prices, hours, products, locations, names | Wrong facts cost you customers who never click |
Sources cited | Your site, or which third-party sites | Shows who's shaping the answer |
Tone | Positive, neutral, or negative | A negative summary is shown to every searcher |
Competitors named? | Which ones | Shows where rivals get into your results |
Up to date? | Old pricing, discontinued products, old videos | Stale facts are usually the easiest fix |
A few columns need more than a glance.
Accuracy. Oumi tested AI Overviews for The New York Times and found about 91% contained the correct answer, but only 39% were both correct and fully supported by the sources they cited. So don't stop at "sounds right." Open the cited source and check it says what the summary claims.
Sources. An AirOps study of 21,311 brand mentions in ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity found 85% came from third-party domains and only 13.2% from the brand's own site. Google wasn't part of that study, but Ahrefs saw Wikipedia, YouTube, and LinkedIn dominate citations for big brands. Most small businesses don't have a Wikipedia page, so expect your Google Business Profile, Yelp, Facebook, directories, and Reddit threads to fill that space.
Tone. A March 2026 BrightEdge study found Google AI Overviews were 44% more likely than ChatGPT to surface negative brand sentiment. The rate is low (about 2.3% of brand mentions against 1.6%), but Google's negativity leaned toward lawsuits, data breaches, and recalls. One old news story can set your tone for years.
Competitors. Ahrefs found only 3.4% of branded AI Overviews mentioned a rival. Watch your "vs" and "alternatives" rows instead.
What to do
Give every row a color:
- Green: accurate, neutral or positive, citing sources you're happy with.
- Yellow: accurate, but built entirely on third-party sites.
- Red: wrong, outdated, or negative.
What your results are telling you
No AI Overview. Nothing to fix yet. Check again next month.
Accurate, and it cites your site. The best case. Keep the cited page current, because when your pricing changes, Google needs to see it there.
Accurate, but every source belongs to someone else. Fine for now, but you're relying on profiles you don't run.
A Seer Interactive study run with Trustpilot of 804,491 AI responses found brands with even a small Trustpilot profile (1 to 13 reviews) were cited 53.5% of the time, against 1% with no profile. Trustpilot co-ran it, so weigh it accordingly, but that gap is hard to shrug off.
Our review building guide covers how to grow those profiles.
Negative. Find the source: a review site, a news story, a Reddit thread. Respond where the complaint lives, and keep new reviews coming. BrightLocal found 74% of consumers look for reviews from the last three months, so an old complaint loses weight once fresh feedback piles up around it.
Wrong or outdated. Correct the facts on your own site, then on every profile you control. If a third-party page is the problem, you'll need to contact its owner. Our follow-up guide, AI Overviews got your business wrong? How to trace the error and fix it, walks through the full correction process.
Your site is never cited, not even for your own name. Check whether you're blocking Google. Google says there are no extra requirements for AI features beyond normal indexing and snippet eligibility, so a stray noindex tag, nosnippet directive, or robots.txt rule can quietly cut you out. In Seer's data, pages cited in an AI Overview earned roughly 20,743 organic clicks per million impressions. Uncited pages got about 9,445.
What to do
Work in this order:
- Anything factually wrong.
- Anything blocking your site from being cited.
- Negative tone.
- Yellow rows.
Wrong facts hurt you on every search, every day. The rest can wait a week.
Make it a 30-minute monthly habit
After the first run, it's the same searches under the same conditions once a month.
Add one more number: your branded click-through rate from the Search Console filter. If an AI Overview appears on a search and CTR drops the next month, that query jumps the queue.
Our explainer on higher impressions and fewer clicks helps you read those numbers, and how to track and grow your AI search visibility goes deeper on monitoring.
Let a tool handle the monthly rerun
A manual scorecard is the best way to learn what Google says about you. But checking 20 searches every month gets old fast, and it only covers Google.
SEO Site Checkup's LLM Visibility Checker tracks how AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, and Copilot mention your brand, including which sources they cite and whether the tone is positive, neutral, or cautious. Use your scorecard to set the baseline, then let the checker tell you when something changes.
