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So when I started looking at how Google AI Overviews behave on plain brand name searches, like “wikipedia” or “adobe”, I pulled up a stack of them side by side.
The pattern isn’t as uniform as I expected.
Top of page for some brands
Search “wikipedia” and the AI Overview sits right near the top, just under the usual organic listings, summarizing what Wikipedia is, who founded it, and how large it’s grown. Search “adobe” and you get the same placement, with an overview covering Creative Cloud and Document Cloud.
Mid-page for others
Scroll through searches like “reddit,” “amazon,” “samsung,” “motorola,” “yahoo,” “apple,” and “poland spring,” and the AI Overview often sits further down the page, sometimes well below the fold. The content is similar in style, a short description plus a few bulleted highlights, but you have to scroll to find it.
Why this matters for brand searches
If you’re tracking how your own brand appears in Google’s AI Overview, position matters as much as presence. A brand overview at the top gets seen by nearly everyone who searches the name. One lower down the page competes with other results for attention, and some searchers may never scroll that far.
This also means a brand showing up in an AI Overview at all isn’t a reliable signal of the position. Worth checking both separately before you draw conclusions about your own visibility.
