Google has started moving AI Overviews for brand-related keywords to the right-hand column of search results. Previously, they appeared at the top or in the middle of the main results section - the same real estate occupied by answer boxes and featured snippets over the years. This is not a minor cosmetic tweak. It changes the relationship between AI-generated brand summaries and the standard search flow that users follow.
For businesses running AEO programmes, the immediate question is practical: if Google is now surfacing your brand's AI Overview in a sidebar rather than inline, does that affect how users encounter it, how often they read it, and whether it drives any measurable action? The honest answer is that we do not yet know the click and engagement implications. But the structural shift is worth thinking through carefully.
What the Right Column Historically Signals
The right-hand column in Google search has a history. Knowledge panels for brands, organisations, and notable entities have lived there for years. That placement signals something specific: this is supplementary context about a known entity, not a direct answer to a question. By moving brand AI Overviews to that position, Google appears to be making a distinction between informational AI answers - which stay inline - and brand-contextual AI summaries, which are being treated more like entity panels.
This matters for how you think about the content driving those AI Overviews. Inline AI Overviews tend to pull from authoritative sources answering a specific query. Right-column entity panels pull from structured, factual brand information - official websites, Wikipedia, Google Business Profile data, schema markup. If Google is blurring these two formats for brand queries, then the signals feeding your brand AI Overview may be shifting more towards entity data than pure content relevance.
Brand Queries Are a Different AEO Problem
Most AEO and GEO work focuses on category and comparison queries - the searches where a user is trying to understand a topic or choose between options. Brand queries are different. Someone searching for your company name already knows you exist. The AI Overview for that query is not helping them discover you; it is shaping what they understand about you before they click through.
That makes accuracy and completeness the primary concern. If the AI Overview summarising your brand contains outdated information, wrong product descriptions, or descriptions pulled from third-party sources rather than your own, that is a reputation and conversion problem - regardless of where on the page it appears. The right-column shift makes this more visible in a literal sense: the summary sits alongside your organic listing rather than above it, which means a user can compare your AI-generated summary against your own website title and meta description in the same glance.
Brands that have not done the basic work of ensuring consistent, structured information across their own site, Google Business Profile, and third-party references are more exposed by this format change than those that have. The sidebar is not burying the AI Overview - it is arguably framing it as definitive brand context.
The Entity Signals That Feed Brand AI Overviews
Given the move towards entity-panel territory, it is worth being specific about what signals are most likely to influence a brand AI Overview. Schema markup on your own website - particularly Organisation schema with accurate name, description, founding date, contact points, and social profiles - gives Google structured data to pull from directly. This has always been good practice; it is now more directly relevant to what appears in brand SERP features.
Beyond your own site, the sources Google uses to construct entity understanding include Wikipedia where it exists, Wikidata, your Google Business Profile, and high-authority third-party mentions. Digital PR that earns factual, consistent citations in credible publications feeds this. The brand AI Overview is not purely an SEO artefact - it is an entity representation, and entity representations are built from the aggregate of what credible sources say about you.
If you have conflicting descriptions of what your business does across different sources - a common problem for businesses that have pivoted, rebranded, or expanded their offer - that inconsistency can surface in unpredictable ways when AI assembles a summary. Auditing the information Google has for your brand entity, and correcting it where possible, is not glamorous work, but it directly affects what appears in that right-column overview.
How to Track Whether This Placement Change Affects You
Start by checking your own brand queries manually. Search your company name and primary brand variants to see whether an AI Overview appears in the right column or inline. Document what it says, what sources it cites if any are visible, and how it compares to your own brand description. This is not something you can automate at scale with most tools right now, which means periodic manual auditing is necessary.
In Google Search Console, filter impressions and clicks for your brand-name queries. If the right-column placement change affects engagement - and it may, because sidebar content often receives less interaction than inline content - you would expect to see impression counts holding steady while click-through rates shift. That pattern, if it emerges, would suggest users are seeing the AI Overview but not acting on it in the same way. It would not tell you the whole story, but it would give you a signal worth investigating.
In your CRM, brand-query traffic tends to convert at a different rate to category traffic because the intent is different. If you track source and medium with proper UTM discipline and have AI referral traffic tagged correctly, you can look for changes in brand-query behaviour over time. A drop in direct branded traffic with no corresponding increase in AI-referred traffic on brand terms would be a useful data point - though isolating causation from a placement change alone is difficult given everything else Google adjusts simultaneously.
What This Means for AEO Programme Priorities
This change reinforces something that often gets underweighted in AEO programmes: brand entity health is not the same as content strategy, and both need attention. Most programmes rightly focus on creating content that earns AI citations for category and informational queries. But if your brand entity representation is inconsistent or incomplete, Google will fill the gaps with whatever it can find - and that may not be accurate.
The right-column placement, whatever its long-term trajectory, is a prompt to treat your brand SERP as a managed asset. That means reviewing Organisation schema, auditing your Google Business Profile, checking what Wikipedia or Wikidata says about your business if entries exist, and ensuring that high-authority external sources describe you consistently. None of this is new advice, but the structural change Google has made to where brand AI Overviews appear gives it renewed urgency.
It also raises a question worth sitting with: if brand AI Overviews are moving closer to knowledge panel territory, will Google eventually merge these formats? A single right-column entity panel that combines structured entity data with AI-generated narrative would be a significant change to how brand SERPs function. Watch this space carefully over the coming months.