When someone searches a business by name, Google's AI now cites its service and About pages far more than its homepage, and our audit never looks at that search at all.

ChatGPT's newest entry is still locked chats (20 October). Google's newest changelog entry is still the 23 October URL note, and the status dashboard lists no October incident; the last ranking entry is the September spam update. Perplexity's changelog is unchanged and marks no current Sonar model as deprecated. Anthropic's newest posts are still 22 October, and the deprecations table is unchanged: Sonnet 4.5 retires 30 November, Haiku 4.5 is still listed Active with no retirement notice. Bing's webmaster blog still ends at 13 October, and Cloudflare's newest posts (23 October) are about file serving and cryptography.

Method in one clause: 1,000 US and 1,000 German brand-name keywords across 17 industries (333 small-business, 333 mid-market and 334 enterprise brands per country), each checked three times on desktop in October 2026, with citations analysed for 827 US overviews. In the US an overview appeared on 82.5% of brand searches on average and on 77.5% of small-business brand searches in all three checks (enterprise 70.7%). Of the brand's own pages cited, the homepage was 36.8% in overviews against 71.1% in the blue links, while service, product and category pages were 22.9% against 6.1%, and About pages 11.7% against 3.8%. 62.2% of the brand-site pages cited sat outside the top 10 blue links. The brand's own site was 33.8% of all citations, Google Business Profile 2.7%, YouTube and review sites 20.8%, and about 39% came from sources the brand does not control. 703 of 827 US overviews (85%) cited at least one brand-controlled source. SE Ranking sells AI visibility tracking; "small business" here means low search volume brands across 17 industries, not coaches, and this is a desktop snapshot.

The article says "AI Overviews now show up for over 80% of Google Searches", up from 50% in June last year, citing "recent data from Semrush, SE Ranking, and seoClarity". None of the three is named as the source of the 80%: SE Ranking's number is branded searches only, seoClarity's (shared privately with Schwartz) is over 62% of queries, 55% to 84% by industry, and Semrush's linked study is 400 commercial keywords in three industries. No sample, method or Google comment.