By the Mayab Media Team
Search "Apple" on a desktop in the US right now and the AI Overview may not be the first thing you see. It's off to the right, in the spot where the knowledge panel used to live.
Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable spotted it on November 2. Google has moved AI Overviews for many brand searches (Apple, Zillow, Coke and Google itself were among his examples) out of the main column and into the right-hand panel. David McSweeney had flagged the same pattern on October 31.
Google hasn't announced it. No help page, no statement, no word on whether it's a test.
So treat it as real but temporary. Google tests layouts constantly, and some of them stick around for years while others vanish in a week.
Your site is back on top. For now.
For a lot of brands this is a relief. Over the summer, AI Overviews spread across branded queries fast. PPC Land, citing Ahrefs data, reported they appeared on 82.91% of US desktop branded keyword results on September 29. That meant someone searching your company's name often read Google's summary of you before they reached your homepage.
In the examples Schwartz shared, the brand's own website moves back to the top of the main results. That's the spot you want. It's also the spot you paid for in a sense, through years of building a brand people search by name.
But look at what's replacing what.
The right column used to hold the knowledge panel, which pulled mostly from structured facts. Now it can hold an AI-written description of your business. Sachin Patel had already noticed, on October 27, a knowledge panel carrying an AI-generated label.
That matters because AI summaries get things wrong. PPC Land pointed out that in the Zillow panel, the AI text gave one founding year and a fact row right below it gave another. Small error. Real problem. Imagine the same thing with your prices, your hours or a service you stopped offering.
The PMax change landing the same week
Paid search teams should read this bit twice. Around the same time, Google added a new section to its Performance Max help document on how PMax interacts with other campaigns. It now says PMax may filter out navigational and brand-specific queries and send them to dedicated brand Search campaigns instead.
Google's advice in that document: give your brand Search campaign enough budget and good, eligible ads, and use Search Themes in PMax if you want it to target brand traffic.
So if you run PMax without a separate brand campaign, ask yourself where your brand clicks are going. Possibly nowhere. Or to a competitor bidding on your name. Neither is great.
We'd be careful with this one. The doc says PMax "may" filter these queries. It doesn't say it always will, and Google hasn't said when this behavior started. Still, the direction is clear enough to act on.
Some quick math. Say brand searches drive 400 conversions a month for you through PMax. If even a quarter of those queries stop matching and you have no brand campaign to catch them, that's 100 conversions you'd need to recover somewhere. Brand clicks aren't getting cheaper either: Tinuiti reported branded cost per click rose 5% in Q3, according to PPC Land.
Two checks before you celebrate
We wouldn't rebuild anything around a layout Google hasn't confirmed. It could change again next week. These two checks are cheap, though.
Search your own brand on desktop and mobile. Screenshot what shows up. Read every line of the AI summary about you. If something is wrong, fix the source: your website's about page, your Google Business Profile, your structured data. Then compare clicks on branded queries in Search Console for late October against the weeks before, and keep watching.
Audit how brand traffic flows in Google Ads. If you rely on PMax alone, set up a lean brand Search campaign with a sensible daily budget. If you already have one, check that it's not limited by budget and that its ads are approved. Then look at PMax's search term insights to see whether brand terms are still showing up there.
Neither takes more than an afternoon. Skipping them could cost you brand clicks you never knew you were losing.
Google gave your homepage its spot back on many brand searches, but it's quietly changing who answers for your brand, and your ad setup needs to catch up.
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