The battle for brand visibility in AI search is entering a new phase, but the ground rules haven’t changed. As OpenAI and Google roll out tools that let companies shape their presence, new data from Victorious shows that what AI actually says about a business still depends heavily on external websites and third-party mentions.
ChatGPT now lets businesses claim profiles, and Google moved brand AI Overviews to its right column. Both answers still draw on sources outside the company.
We should fix the profiles that we own before we go after any new coverage because these systems are reading these wrong profiles and information today.”— Michael Transon, CEO, VictoriousSAN FRANCISCO, CA, UNITED STATES, November 13, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — OpenAI introduced Businesses in ChatGPT as a beta feature on Nov. 10. Verified companies can now claim a profile, update fields like their description and category, add product feeds, and monitor how often ChatGPT references their site. Eight days prior, Search Engine Roundtable noted that Google had shifted AI Overviews for many brand searches into the right-hand column of desktop results, a spot traditionally reserved for knowledge panels. Google has yet to formally announce the adjustment.
Even with these updates, both platforms still craft their primary company responses from a broader set of references. According to OpenAI’s help center, claiming a business does not ensure higher visibility or grant direct control over ChatGPT’s independent answers, and the assistant may pull from other sources when responding to queries about a company. The Business Agent that a company can set up operates as a separate, labeled conversation, kept apart from ChatGPT’s own responses. On Google, a business can request changes to a claimed knowledge panel, but the AI Overview is built from cited web pages and offers no comparable editing mechanism.
The frequency of brand-related AI Overviews on Google is climbing, and the bulk of what those answers cite comes from external websites. BrightEdge reported on Nov. 6 that AI Overviews appeared for 64 percent of 282 tracked brand and product names in late October, a significant jump from 19 percent in mid-August. A separate analysis of AI Overviews for 100 brand names, released Oct. 1 by Slate, showed that 29 percent of citations pointed back to the brand’s own domain.
Victorious, an SEO and AEO agency focused on AI search visibility for mid-market and enterprise clients, has observed company websites losing traction across AI platforms. Its Q3 2026 Search Report, which drew from roughly 16,500 responses across nine AI platforms, found that company websites fell from 65.2 percent to 55.5 percent of citations on research-stage questions between the second and third quarters. Outside coverage also played a role in which brands appeared at all. Among the brands studied, 90.5 percent were never mentioned in answers to their own category’s questions, and the number of websites referencing and linking to a brand was a predictor of which brands AI chose to name. That mentions-and-links finding is a correlation within the report’s specific group of brands.
Michael Transon, CEO of Victorious, has explained how AI answers often funnel through those external sources. “The thing that gets ranked is going to be in AI answers things like a directory or a review site or list of the best companies. Your company is a name inside of those sources,” Transon said on episode 12 of The Search Signal, the agency’s podcast.
He has urged companies to focus first on the profiles they manage on those third-party sites. “We should fix the profiles that we own before we go after any new coverage because these systems are reading these wrong profiles and information today. And fixing them is going to help take a wrong description out of what they read,” he said on episode 14.
The complete Q3 2026 Search Report is available on the Victorious website.
About Victorious
Victorious is an SEO and AEO agency that helps mid-market and enterprise companies grow their visibility in Google and AI platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity. Founded in 2013 and headquartered in San Francisco, the agency delivers technical SEO, content strategies, and digital PR. Victorious has been named Search Agency of the Year five times by juries of its peers at the US Search Awards, the US Agency Awards, and Search Engine Land.
Jill Maldonado
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Why it matters: As AI search becomes a primary gateway for consumers, brands cannot assume that claiming a profile or editing a knowledge panel will shape the narrative. The data from Victorious underscores that a company’s online reputation in AI is still largely written by third-party sources, meaning businesses must actively manage their presence across directories, review sites, and media coverage to influence what AI assistants say about them.
