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I’ve been writing blog content for several years, and branded searches were quite easy. When you typed a company’s name into Google, you’d see their website at the top of the results and an excerpt about the brand story.

But since search is changing, brand mentions are now generated by AI Overviews, as shown by two individual sources:

• DemandSphere tracked daily branded keywords that showed an AI Overview, starting in September at 26.1%, then reaching 90.5% on September 27. On 29 September, the number remained above 82%.

• Chris Long of Nectiv made similar observations, with AI Overviews showing up for 93 of the 100 enterprise brand names he tested.

Share of tracked branded keywords reurning an AI Overview (Demandsphere, 2026)

These show that AI Overviews appeared for up to 90% of tracked branded keywords. But does it work for small brands? And where is the data pulled from? Is it only your website?

These are the things I wanted to investigate today.

How I Check If AI Overviews Show Up for My Brand

For the purpose of this test, I will be using my own site, Studio Scribis (studioscribis.com). It’s a small niche blog mainly with writing tips, but it has an engaged audience of 500+ monthly readers. I don’t sell products or courses; I only have my blog and writing services, so it’s interesting to see what results come up!

There are two methods I plan to use:

• The first is the manual search method: I go to Google and type my “brand name”, or variations like “brand name + review”.

• The second is to use a tool like Semrush’s free AI visibility checker. I have used the paid version before, but curious to see how well this tool scans brand mentions and AI citations to see which AI platforms mention the most.

And as a bonus, I want to check the AI visibility of my client’s website and see how the posts I wrote for them a while ago perform currently.

Method 1: Searching my brand on Google

I opened a new incognito tab, went to Google, and searched “studio scribis”, which is the name of my blog.

Google results showed an AI Overview about my writing agency. It picked up key points like my industry, services, and location.

When I clicked to inspect the sources, it used two main sources: my LinkedIn page and my website, studioscribis.com.

Google AI Overview Sources

The only issue with the manual method is that while I can see that my brand appears in AI-generated summaries, I cannot see if people are actually searching for my brand name, and if anyone has found my site from there.

Next, I will do some more detailed checks.

Method 2: Using Semrush’s AI visibility checker

For the second method, I used the free AI visibility checker from Semrush. The free version allows me 3 checks, so I ran it on my own website and on a client website.

You don’t even need to sign up.

• Open the AI Visibility Checker
• Type in your website URL (with the .com)
• Click “Check AI Visibility”

The tool generates a summary of your mentions across AI platforms including Gemini, ChatGPT, AI Mode and Google AI Overviews, plus total citations.

You also get an AI visibility score, which shows how consistently your brand appears in AI searches compared to others.

What I found for my own site

My site’s AI visibility is very low.

• 0 AI visibility score
• 0 mentions
• 3 citations

That surprised me, because Google’s AI Overview did describe my brand when I searched for it. Maybe it’s because people don’t actually search for my brand name, but they discover my content through blog posts cited in AI answers.

My citations came from blog posts, not main landing pages.

This makes sense, since I post a lot of educational posts that show up in regular search as well.

What I found for a former client’s site

When I looked at the client website, Pallyy, the overview was much more colourful:

• 225 mentions
• 175 citations
• 5.1M audience reach

Most of the mentions came from AI Overviews and AI Mode.

What surprised me is even with those numbers, the Semrush score was 22 and labeled “Low”. Which makes me wonder: what does it take to have enough mentions?

Well, the answer is actually given, I just had to dig in more.

AI Visibility Score measures how often a brand is mentioned by AI tools compared to similar brands.

Pallyy is in a competitive social media management field; so I think that’s why their AI Visibility is labeled “low.” They might be comparing it with giant brands like Meta, Instagram, etc.

Top Cited Pages includes blog posts I wrote for Pallyy over a year ago, but they were recently updated with a short summary section at the top. I suspect this small addition helps older content be picked up in AI mentions.

This blog post is the most cited page, with 72 citations.

The part that worries me: Brands don’t control where the AI Overviews comes from

The AI Overview about my brand was accurate, and a short summary that can be helpful for people searching for the brand. But I didn’t write it myself, and I cannot control which sources the AI pulls from next time. One of the sources was my LinkedIn page, which I did not expect.

Nectiv’s research on how AI builds answers also found that reviews on sites like G2 and Capterra were included in the answers. That matters for a tech brand like Pallyy, which relies on Capterra reviews from users.

But what happens if a brand gets a wave of negative reviews? Or if a competitor intentionally pays influencers to write bad reviews or complains about your brand on social media. I am concerned that competitors and outside sources can now manipulate how a brand appears in AI Overviews.

I haven’t seen this happen, but if that’s what people read first about your brand and you can’t even edit it or provide your own point of view, I can see how AI Overviews can be biased and questionable. Not that Wikipedia is 100% accurate, but at least we can see the sources and who edited what.

Checking your AI visibility only takes a few minutes, and it’s not too technical or difficult to understand. If you want to try it out, Semrush offers the AI Visibility Toolkit as part of Semrush One.