AI Overviews Are Eating Your Brand: What to Do Now

AI Overviews now appear on 83% of branded search queries, according to Ahrefs research published this week. That means when someone searches your company’s name, there’s an eight-in-ten chance Google is synthesising an answer about you — and it may not be pulling from your own site.

This isn’t a future concern. It’s happening right now, and the brands that understand the new mechanics of search visibility will be the ones that stay in control of their own narrative.

Your Brand Page Is No Longer the First Word About You

Ahrefs’ analysis of branded queries found that AI Overviews frequently surface third-party sources — Wikipedia, YouTube, review platforms, news articles — ahead of or instead of a brand’s own web presence. For Southeast Asian brands, this carries particular weight. A regional consumer goods company, for instance, might find that its AI Overview is being constructed from a Lazada product listing, a Reddit thread, or a years-old tech blog review — none of which the brand controls or has recently updated.

The practical implication is that brand equity is now partially determined by what the open web says about you, as interpreted by Google’s AI layer. Owned channels remain essential, but they’re no longer sufficient on their own. Brands need a deliberate third-party content strategy: proactive management of Wikipedia entries, active seeding of brand-accurate information across authoritative platforms, and consistent engagement with the review ecosystems that AI Overviews are known to cite.

Structured Authority: Writing for AI Comprehension, Not Just Human Readers

Andrej Karpathy, an OpenAI founding member, recently argued that LLMs process and reproduce structured, precise writing far more reliably than conversational or marketing-inflected prose. His suggestion — ask LLMs to explain something as if writing an aerospace technical manual — is a useful mental model for GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) practitioners.

The aircraft manual standard means: unambiguous language, clear hierarchical structure, no rhetorical flourishes, and explicit definitions of every key term. Applied to brand content, this translates to FAQ pages with precise answers, About pages that define what the company does in one declarative sentence, and product descriptions that answer the exact questions a searcher would have rather than leading with brand voice.

For Southeast Asian markets, this requires an additional layer of thought. Multilingual audiences mean that your structured content may need to exist in Thai, Bahasa Indonesia, and Vietnamese — not just English — to be consistently cited across localised AI Overviews. Brands operating across multiple ASEAN markets should treat each language version as a separate citation target, not a translation afterthought.

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Fake Authors Are Now a Formal Google Red Flag

Google has updated its Helpful Content guidance to explicitly warn against fabricated author profiles — a practice that Search Engine Journal reports was already flagged in Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines but has now been elevated to front-facing site owner documentation. This matters more than it might initially appear.

In the rush to publish AI-assisted content at scale, some brands and agencies have created fictional personas — complete with headshots generated by AI — to lend credibility to articles. Google is now formally on record that this is a deceptive signal, and it’s reasonable to expect that detection mechanisms will follow the policy change. The risk isn’t just a ranking penalty; it’s a trust signal collapse at precisely the moment when E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) is the primary currency of AI citation eligibility.

The fix is also the correct long-term play: real authors, real credentials, real bylines linked to real professional profiles. For agencies and brands managing content at scale in Southeast Asia, this means investing in named subject-matter experts — whether in-house strategists, regional consultants, or verified industry voices — who can be legitimately attributed to published content. A senior logistics manager writing about last-mile delivery challenges in Metro Manila carries more citation weight than an unattributed article on the same topic, regardless of how well-optimised it is.

Proximity Is Still a Strategy — Even in an AI-First World

Local SEO practitioners sometimes feel left behind in the AI Overview conversation, as if hyperlocal signals are irrelevant once an LLM enters the picture. They’re not. Google Business Profile data, localised review signals, and neighbourhood-level content remain foundational inputs for local AI Overviews and Local Pack results. What changes is the threshold for authority.

A Grab-listed restaurant in Bangkok or a Shopee-verified merchant in Surabaya now needs to think about its AI citation footprint the same way it thinks about its star rating: proactively, consistently, and with an understanding that what third parties say is as important as what the brand publishes itself. Structured schema markup on location pages, consistent NAP (Name, Address, Phone) data across all platforms, and category-specific FAQ content that mirrors actual local search queries are the tactical levers. None of this is new — but the stakes attached to getting it right have materially increased.

Key Takeaways

• Audit which third-party sources are appearing in your branded AI Overviews and build a deliberate content seeding strategy to influence those sources.
• Restructure your most important owned content — About pages, product descriptions, FAQ sections — using precise, hierarchical language that AI systems can parse and cite cleanly.
• Attribute all published content to real, credentialled authors and build those authors’ professional footprints across LinkedIn, industry publications, and relevant ASEAN platforms.

The uncomfortable question AI Overviews force brands to confront is this: if you disappeared from your own website tomorrow, what would the open web say about you? For most brands, the honest answer reveals a significant gap between the story they intend to tell and the one that’s actually being told — and cited — on their behalf. Closing that gap is now a core search strategy responsibility, not a PR one.

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At grzzly, we work with brands across Southeast Asia on exactly this: building search authority that holds up when AI intermediaries get between your brand and your audience. From GEO-ready content architecture to local citation audits across ASEAN platforms, we help teams understand where their visibility is leaking — and how to fix it. Let’s talk