Google Has Moved Brand AI Overviews to the Side of the Page: What It Means for Your Visibility

What's actually changed

Google has moved the AI Overview for a lot of brand-name searches out of the top spot and into the right-hand column of the results page. Search trackers confirmed this on 3 November 2026. If you've been proudly screenshotting your business's AI Overview for the last few months, go and check it again. It may well have shuffled sideways.

Until now, these brand-related AI Overviews sat at the top or middle of the main results, right where your eye lands first. That's the bit Google has changed. The summary about your business hasn't disappeared, but it's no longer hogging the prime real estate at the centre of the page.

Why this matters less than you think

Here's the bit that should actually calm you down. AI Overviews across Google, for all types of searches including typos and queries with no real results, now appear on over 80% of searches. They're everywhere. That was true before this layout change and it's still true now.

And despite being everywhere, an opt-out study found AI Overviews and AI Mode have a click-through rate of just 0.9%. People read the summary and move on. They weren't clicking through from that top-of-page box in big numbers before, so losing the top spot isn't the hit to your traffic it might feel like. The badge of honour was never doing as much heavy lifting as it looked like it was.

This sits inside a bigger pattern of Google quietly reshaping how these boxes work. It's also testing removing the AI Mode button from the main search bar altogether, which tells you this whole area of the results page is still being rearranged. If you want a proper read on where your visibility actually comes from now, our SEO and marketing team keeps track of these shifts so you don't have to.

The trend behind the move

This isn't an isolated tweak. Google has also updated the links shown inside AI Mode and AI Overviews again, but it won't share click data for them, so nobody outside Google can see exactly how those links perform. On top of that, Google is testing dropping the citation cards from AI Overviews entirely, and has already removed the 'AI Overview' label from some of them.

Put that together and you get a picture of Google making these boxes less obviously a separate feature, and less easy for anyone, including you, to measure. The sidebar move for brand searches fits that same direction of travel: less prominence, less visibility into what's working, more AI summary baked quietly into the page.

Your two-minute check

Don't guess, go and look. Here's the quick version:

• Search your business name on Google, on both desktop and mobile.
• Note where the AI Overview sits: top/middle of the main column, or over to the right.
• Check a competitor's brand name too, so you know if it's just you or the whole market.
• Look at whether your website is still cited anywhere in that box, wherever it's sitting.

If your AI Overview has moved to the side, that's expected and not a sign you've done anything wrong. If it's vanished completely, or your site's no longer mentioned in it, that's worth a proper look rather than a guess.

What to do now

Run the two-minute check above today. If your business's AI Overview has shifted, disappeared, or your site's dropped out of the citations, don't just shrug and hope. Talk to our SEO and marketing team about what's actually driving visitors to your site now that clicks from these boxes are so thin on the ground. Or if you'd rather just ask us straight out what this means for your business specifically, get in touch and request a quote. We'll give you a plain answer, not a sales pitch.

Sources

• Search Engine Roundtable, Daily Search Forum Recap: November 3, 2026, 3 November 2026
• Search Engine Roundtable, November 2026 Google Webmaster Report: Spam Update Done, AI Overviews, Help Docs, Local & Earnings, 2 November 2026