Google has moved the AI Overviews that appear for many brand-name searches into the right-hand column of its desktop results, the space where knowledge panels have long sat, Search Engine Roundtable reported on November 2, 2026. Google has not announced the change. Examples published so far show AI-written company summaries for Apple, Zillow, Coca-Cola, Google itself and Search Engine Roundtable displayed beside the main list of results rather than inside it.

In Short

When people search Google for a big brand name like Apple, the AI-written summary about that company now often shows up in the side column of the page instead of in the middle of the results. That matters to brands because the side column is where Google used to show its fact box about a company, and the description there is now written by AI. The brand's own website gets the main column back in the examples seen so far, but nobody outside Google knows yet whether that changes how many people click on it.

What the report says

The story was published at 12:15 pm US Eastern time on November 2 by Barry Schwartz, under the headline "Google AI Overviews For Brands Moved To Right Column." It concerns AI Overviews, the generated summaries Google places on its results pages. According to Search Engine Roundtable, Google "has moved the AI Overviews for many brand-related keywords to the right-hand column of the search results page." The report adds: "Previously, they appeared at the top or middle of the main search results section."

The scope is "many" brand keywords, not all of them. No Google announcement, help page update or statement from a Google representative accompanies the report, and Google has not said whether the layout is a test or a permanent change. Every example Search Engine Roundtable published shows results set to the United States, so there is no evidence yet on whether the layout appears in other markets.

Apple, before and after

The clearest comparison involves a search for [apple]. In the newer layout, the main column on the left opens with apple.com and a block of sitelinks for iPhone, iPad, Store, Newsroom and Watch. The right column carries a panel labelled "AI Overview." It shows the company name, a 4.6 rating from 12K reviews with a "Top Quality Store" badge, product images, free delivery on most purchases, free returns within 14 days, payment options including PayPal, and a button pointing to www.apple.com. Below that sits the generated text: "Apple Inc. is a multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, that designs and manufactures consumer..." A "Show more" button expands it. Fact rows follow, listing a customer service number and the founders, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne.

The earlier version looked quite different. The AI Overview sat at the top of the main column, directly under the search box. It described Apple as "a major American technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California," cited Wikipedia, and opened a "Company Overview" section with the founding year, 1976, and a leadership line stating that John Ternus serves as chief executive, sourced to Bloomberg.com.

So the content has not disappeared. It has been compressed, moved sideways and merged with the commerce and fact data that used to belong to the knowledge panel.

Zillow, Coca-Cola, Google and Search Engine Roundtable

Four more examples follow the same pattern. A search for [zillow] returns zillow.com at the top of the main column, while the right column shows an AI Overview labelled "Real estate company," with fact rows naming Jeremy Wacksman as chief executive since August 2024, Lloyd Frink and Susan Daimler as presidents, and Rich Barton and Lloyd Frink as founders. A search for [coca cola] produces a panel labelled "Carbonated soft drinks," with brand imagery and the line "Coca-Cola is a globally iconic carbonated soft drink invented in 1886 by pharmacist John Stith Pemberton in Atlanta, Georgia," cited to Wikipedia, plus a date row of May 8, 1886, sourced to loc.gov.

The [google] query is the most telling of the set. Google's own brand now returns an AI Overview in the right column, describing "Google LLC" as "a multinational technology corporation specializing in internet-related services, online advertising, search engine technology, cloud..." The panel lists Larry Page and Sergey Brin as founders, September 4, 1998 in Menlo Park as the founding date, Mountain View as headquarters and Sundar Pichai as chief executive since October 2, 2015.

That matters because of what Search Engine Roundtable itself reported five weeks earlier. On September 30, 2026, the same site said AI Overviews were returning for many large brand names, with the exception of Google and news publications. Both exceptions are gone from the November 2 examples: [google] shows an AI Overview, and so does [search engine roundtable], a news site. In the latter case, the claimed panel header, "Search Engine Roundtable on Google," with its "Suggest edits" and "Learn more" links, still sits at the top of the right column. The AI Overview, with a logo, a Follow button, a generated description of the site as "a prominent news and media website," and a "Latest posts" module, appears directly beneath it.

Who noticed first

Two search marketers flagged the change on X before the report ran. David McSweeney posted on October 31: "Unless I missed it previously, seems to me like Google has changed the layout for branded searches, with AI overviews now generally in a right panel on desktop (or in some cases further down the page)." He added: "Assuming it is a change, it's a good one." And then a third line that matters as much as the first two: "Seeing some other variations too."

Chris Long of Nectiv followed on the morning of November 2. "Whoa, Google is changing the way they're showing AI Overviews for brand searches," he wrote. "Instead of a Knowledge Panel, they're showing AI Overviews for brand terms in the right column."

Schwartz's own reading was mixed. "I think this works much better than having it in the main results, but at the same time, it is not great to trust that AI will do a good enough job writing about your brand than your own website would," he wrote. In his view, Google is "essentially replacing brand knowledge panels with AI Overviews."

McSweeney's caveat, that some AI Overviews moved further down the page rather than to the side, and that other variations exist, suggests the rollout is uneven. None of the three observers published a count of how many brand queries carry the new layout.

A month after AI Overviews took over brand searches

The relocation follows a sharp rise in AI Overviews on brand queries in September. Chris Long posted on September 30 that 93 of the 100 brands he tested showed an AI Overview; he did not publish the list. Search Engine Roundtable's report the same day described most of those summaries as appearing below the brand's main result or further down the page, with Adobe an exception at the top.

Ahrefs published a larger dataset on October 2, built on 232.8 million US desktop result crawls between July and September 2026, 92.5 million of them for branded keywords. According to Ahrefs, AI Overviews appeared on 82.91% of branded keyword results on September 29, the basis for the 83% in its headline. Its monthly average for branded keywords rose from 61.3% in July to 65.1% in August and 73.3% in September. A separate Ahrefs panel of 100 bare brand names, taken from Interbrand's Best Global Brands 2025 list, had an AI Overview on 63 of 100 queries by September 30, compared with five of 98 usable results on July 1.

Placement was the striking part. Of those 63 AI Overviews, 48 appeared in what Ahrefs calls position one, an average position of 1.49, meaning the summaries largely took the top spot for a brand's own name instead of the brand's website. Ahrefs did not define how it counts position. Wikipedia was cited in 41 of the 57 AI Overviews that had source lists, YouTube in 22 and LinkedIn in 13.

DemandSphere, according to Search Engine Journal's October 9 account of its data, measured AI Overviews on 26.12% of tracked branded keywords on September 1, 90.48% on September 27 and 82.06% on September 29. DemandSphere did not state its keyword count. The broader trend matches what PPC Land reported on October 22, when Semrush found AI Overviews on 88% of a 400-keyword commercial panel in August 2026, up from 45.75% a year earlier.

Read together, the timeline is short. In September, AI Overviews spread across most brand searches and, by Ahrefs' count, often sat above the brand's own listing. By the end of October, observers saw many of them moved out of the main column entirely.

The idea itself is not new. In late August 2025, SERP Alert reported a desktop test that combined an AI Overview with the knowledge panel in a column-style layout, according to Influencer Marketing Hub, which covered it on September 8, 2025. Google did not comment at the time either.

One panel, two kinds of data

The new panel blends generated text with structured fact rows, and the two do not always agree. In the Zillow example, the AI-written summary describes Zillow Group as "founded in 2006 and headquartered in Seattle." The fact row a few lines below gives "Founded: 2004, Seattle, WA." Zillow was founded in 2004 and opened its website to the public in 2006, so each figure has a basis, but the panel offers two different founding years for the same company without explaining the difference.

That gap goes to the heart of Schwartz's reservation. The knowledge panel was built from entity data that brands could influence through claimed profiles and suggested edits. The AI Overview is written by a model drawing on whatever sources it selects, and in Ahrefs' September panel that most often meant Wikipedia rather than the brand's own site. Whether the "Suggest edits" route visible on the Search Engine Roundtable panel extends to the AI-written text beneath it has not been explained by Google.

PPC Land has covered earlier evidence on how AI systems describe brands. In December 2025, an Ahrefs experiment with an invented brand found that almost every AI platform tested repeated fabricated third-party claims over an official FAQ that denied them, though critics noted that 49 of the 56 prompts were leading questions.

Two other elements in the panels point to where Google is heading. The [google] and [search engine roundtable] panels carry Follow buttons of the kind Google attached to Search profiles when they went live in the US in June. And the Apple panel carries store ratings, delivery terms, return windows and payment methods inside an AI Overview. That commerce layer appears a day after PPC Land reported that Google Search product panels gained Add to cart and Buy now buttons in the US.

Why the placement matters

For brand owners, the immediate effect in the published examples is that their own website leads the main column again. The SERP for [apple], [zillow], [coca cola] and [google] each opens with the official site and its sitelinks, while the AI text moves to the side. On Ahrefs' September data, that is a reversal: the AI Overview had been occupying the top position on most of the brand names it tracked.

What the move does to traffic is unknown. Google publishes no click data for AI Overviews by placement, and its Search Console generative AI report reached every site at the end of August with impressions but without clicks or queries. On the same morning as the right-column report, Search Engine Roundtable ran a separate item under the headline "Gary Illyes Implies Click Data Not Coming To Google Search Console AI Reporting." Brands therefore have no first-party way to see whether a side-column summary sends more or fewer visits than a top-of-page one.

The research that does exist mostly concerns informational queries, not brand names. A randomized study published in July 2026 found AI Overviews cut outbound organic clicks by 39.8% among 1,065 US desktop Chrome users. Pew Research Center measured an 8% click-through rate on searches with AI summaries against 15% without them, a finding Google disputed in July 2025. Brand searches behave differently, since most people typing a company name want to reach that company. Whether an AI summary in the side column turns some of those visits into zero-click searches, or simply sits beside a click that was going to happen anyway, no one has measured publicly.

Paid search has its own stake. Brand terms are a core line in many search accounts, and Google itself has been promoting their value. In July, PPC Land reported that Google linked each additional branded search to an average $31 sales gain after a YouTube ad exposure. In June, Google added branded search controls to AI Max, letting advertisers choose whether ads appear on searches containing brand names. The right-column change alters the page those branded clicks land on. None of the published examples shows ads, so the report says nothing about how text ads and the relocated AI Overviews sit together. Google stopped placing text ads in the right-hand column of desktop results in February 2016, and the column has since carried mainly knowledge panels.

There is also a longer arc. In February 2026, PPC Land covered a Google patent describing AI-generated pages that could stand in for a company's own landing page when that page scores poorly; the patent does not say Google will deploy it. On October 15, Google said it was testing a dedicated section for official sites at the top of AI responses. The right-column brand panel fits between those two ideas: the official site keeps the main column, while Google's own generated account of the company occupies the space next to it.

Is that a better deal for brands than September's layout? McSweeney and Schwartz both called the change an improvement over AI text in the main results. Schwartz, in the same breath, questioned whether a model should be the one describing a brand at all. Google has not said which of those concerns it was addressing, or whether the layout will stay.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Google, whose desktop search results now show AI Overviews for many brand-name queries in the right-hand column. The change was spotted by David McSweeney and Chris Long and reported by Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable. It affects brands, their search marketing teams and advertisers bidding on brand terms.

What: AI Overviews for brand searches such as [apple], [zillow], [coca cola], [google] and [search engine roundtable] moved from the top or middle of the main results to the right column, where knowledge panels appeared. The new panels combine AI-written descriptions with fact rows, commerce details and Follow buttons, and in the Zillow case the generated text and the fact rows give different founding years.

When: McSweeney noted the layout on October 31, 2026. Long posted about it and Search Engine Roundtable reported it on November 2, 2026. The move follows a September in which AI Overviews spread to most brand searches, reaching 63 of 100 brand names in Ahrefs' panel by September 30.

Where: Google Search on desktop. All published examples show results for the United States; Google has not said where the layout applies.

Why: Google has not explained the change or said whether it is a test. Observers called it an improvement over AI text in the main results, while raising the question of whether a model should describe a brand in place of the knowledge panel. No click data exists to show how the new placement affects traffic to brand websites.