On 2 Nov 2026, Google started placing AI Overviews for many brand-related searches in the right-hand column on desktop, instead of above or within the main results. That’s not cosmetic. It changes what gets seen first, what gets clicked, and what your reporting team thinks is “working.”
The shift was spotted in the wild and documented by Search Engine Roundtable’s report on AI Overviews moving to the right column for brand queries. If you’re responsible for pipeline, reputation, or customer support load, treat this as a new brand SERP layout variant that can swing outcomes quickly.
What changed (and why brand queries are the battleground)
Brand searches are where users come to confirm trust: “Is this the real site?”, “What does this company do?”, “Is it legit?”, “How much is it?”, “How do I contact them?”, “Is it down?” The AI Overview sitting at the top used to intercept that moment head-on.
Now it’s being pushed to the right column for many brand terms. That creates a split attention pattern: users scan the traditional left rail for the obvious official site link, while the right rail behaves like a “trust panel” people glance at when they’re uncertain or comparing.
Our view: Google is testing a compromise. Keep the AI answer visible, but reduce how aggressively it blocks the classic navigation click to the brand’s homepage. That’s good news for brands with strong organic sitelinks—until the Overview becomes the thing people believe when it’s wrong or out of date.
Why it matters to business owners: CTR, trust, and misattribution
Three practical impacts show up fast:
1) Click distribution changes without a ranking change. Your blue-link positions may not move, yet homepage clicks might rise (if the right column gets ignored) or fall (if the Overview answers the user’s intent or introduces competing suggestions). Either way, teams that only watch rank trackers will miss the cause.
2) Brand narrative gets summarised next to your results. The right column is where users “sanity check” claims. If the AI Overview frames your brand as “a marketplace,” “a local provider,” or “an enterprise platform” and that’s not how you sell, it will quietly skew lead quality and sales cycles.
3) Attribution gets messier right when measurement is already constrained. There’s ongoing noise around what data Google will and won’t expose for AI features. Search Engine Roundtable also covered Gary Illyes suggesting click/query data may not be coming to Search Console’s AI reporting: SER’s coverage of Illyes implying AI reporting may exclude clicks and queries. So you may see impact in business results before you see it clearly in Google’s native reports.
Everyone will focus on “did the Overview move?” The miss is this: right-column placement can increase the authority effect. People treat side panels like reference material. That means inaccuracies can do more reputational damage than a bad organic snippet because they feel “verified.”
Who wins, who loses
Likely winners: brands with a clear official homepage snippet, strong sitelinks, and clean knowledge signals (consistent About/Contact, structured data, and widely-cited positioning). If the Overview is out of the main flow, these brands may recover navigational clicks while keeping some AI-assisted discovery on the side.
Likely losers: brands with messy naming (multiple sub-brands, old product names still indexed), thin About pages, or reputation issues. For them, the Overview becomes a summarised “context box” that can amplify third-party framing—reviews, forums, old press—right beside the results users were about to click.
We also expect aggregators and directories to benefit if the Overview cites them as sources and users treat that as validation. Even when users still click the official site, their impression of pricing, availability, or “best for” categories can get set before they arrive.
What we’re changing on client sites this week
This is the immediate plan we’re rolling out for brand SERPs. It’s not months of “AI strategy.” It’s a few controlled edits and measurement fixes so you can see what’s happening.
1) Treat brand SERPs as a separate SEO product
Most SEO roadmaps mix brand and non-brand. Stop doing that. Brand queries behave like navigation, customer support, and trust validation all at once. They need their own KPI set: homepage clicks, contact clicks, branded conversions, and complaint-related query coverage.
2) Rewrite key pages to be quotable by an Overview
AI Overviews tend to summarise what’s easy to lift: crisp definitions, coverage areas, pricing model, and “what makes you different.” We usually recommend adding a short, plain-English block near the top of:
- Homepage
- About page
- Pricing page
- Top product/service page
Make it boringly specific. “We build Shopify stores for UK retailers” beats “end-to-end digital solutions.” If your positioning is vague, the Overview will fill the gap with whatever it finds elsewhere.
3) Update tracking for layout-driven behaviour shifts
This right-column move can change scroll depth, time-to-click, and which elements get interacted with first. If you rely on a single “organic session” metric, you’ll miss the story. We’re tightening event tracking and segmenting brand landing behaviour—especially on desktop.
If your site needs engineering support to implement clean event instrumentation without slowing pages down, this is exactly the kind of work we do in London web builds that prioritise measurement and across US web development for marketing teams.
4) Make support answers crawlable (so the Overview doesn’t improvise)
Brand searches often include “login,” “phone number,” “returns,” “refund,” “opening hours,” “cancellation.” If your answers live behind scripts, in PDFs, or only inside app UI, Google will lean on third-party sources. Put canonical help pages on the open web, keep them updated, and interlink them from brand pages.
What this means for your site (do these in the next 30 days)
- Run a desktop brand SERP audit for your top 20 branded queries and variants (brand + pricing, brand + reviews, brand + login, brand + locations). Screenshot layouts and note whether the AI Overview is right-column.
- Refresh homepage and About copy so the first 150–250 words state: what you do, who it’s for, where you operate, and the primary next step (buy/demo/quote/contact). This is “AI Overview bait” in a good way.
- Add/verify structured data where it’s genuinely accurate (Organization, WebSite with SearchAction, ContactPoint; Product/Service where appropriate). This doesn’t guarantee anything, but it reduces ambiguity.
- Segment brand traffic in reporting (GA4 exploration or Looker Studio) and watch for a step-change in desktop CTR and engagement, not just total sessions.
If you do nothing for 90 days
Expect two slow burns. First: your brand SERP message will drift toward whatever third parties say most clearly. Second: your internal reporting will misdiagnose the cause of changes (sales blames marketing, marketing blames product, nobody blames layout).
By the time you notice lead quality shifting or support tickets rising (“I thought you were X”), competitors will have already rewritten their brand pages to be the easiest thing for Google to summarise—meaning their version of the category becomes the default.
Our take: this is less “AI stole your clicks” and more “AI controls framing”
The overhyped angle is obsessing about a single CTR number. For brand searches, the bigger risk is perception. Right-column placement makes the Overview feel like reference material sitting beside your site. That’s powerful when it’s accurate—and brutal when it isn’t.
If you want a quick gut check, compare your brand SERP before/after and then read your own homepage intro. If a stranger can’t quote what you do in one sentence, the AI Overview will.
Next step: pick five high-value branded queries and send us screenshots plus your current top landing pages—then we’ll tell you what we’d rewrite and what we’d instrument first. If you want to see how we’ve handled SERP-driven shifts before, start with examples from our client work or browse our latest analysis. For execution, our teams run ongoing SEO work in the UK and SEO programmes in the US.
Primary source: Search Engine Roundtable
