Search Zillow on Google right now and the AI Overview still says the company was founded in 2006. Zillow was founded in 2004. Four days after search marketers first noticed Google swapping brand knowledge panels for AI-written summaries, that mistake is still sitting in the right column for anyone to see.
What moved into the right column
For years, a company name search surfaced a knowledge panel on the right. It carried a logo, a founding year, headquarters, a stock price, facts a brand could claim and correct through Google's own tools. Starting in late October, that box began changing shape.
Sachin Patel on X was first to flag it, on October 27, noting a knowledge panel showing an AI-generated label. David McSweeney followed on October 31, describing AI Overviews now sitting in a right panel on desktop for branded searches. Barry Schwartz confirmed the pattern on November 2 at Search Engine Roundtable, with examples spanning Apple, Zillow, Coca-Cola and Google.
Even Search Engine Roundtable's own branded search showed the new layout. In each case the brand's official site still leads the main column with sitelinks. What changed is what used to live beside it.
Zillow's case is the clearest look at the risk. A ppc.land writeup noted the AI summary's 2006 founding date doesn't match the 2004 date in Zillow's own fact rows, a mismatch nobody at Google has reconciled. I checked it again this morning and the AI Overview still opens with the 2006 figure. Four days is long enough that this reads less like a glitch and more like a summary nobody is actively watching.
Nobody at Google has called this a test
That word, test, comes from search marketers describing a pattern they've observed, not from Google. No blog post, no help-center update, no statement to press. The shift in position is the only evidence, and it is consistent enough across unrelated brands that it is clearly deliberate.
| Old knowledge panel | New AI Overview panel | |
|---|---|---|
| Source | Structured facts, partly brand-submitted | An AI-generated summary |
| Who can correct it | The brand, through Google's claim tools | Unclear, some panels show a suggest-edits link |
| Position | Right column | Right column (same spot) |
Schwartz said the side placement works better than when AI Overviews sat in the center of results, crowding out everything else. He also raised the part that matters more for a brand. An AI system describing you is different from your own site describing you. Right now there's no clear path to fix it when the system gets something wrong.
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Guides, comparisons, listicles, case studies, and more. RankControl generates content that gets cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Google AI Mode, and Google AI Overviews.
The business already feels it
Ahrefs tracked AI Overviews on 63 of 100 major brands by the end of September, and found that the summaries show up on roughly 83% of branded keyword searches in a broader dataset from the same month. That's not a fringe experiment anymore. It's most of branded search.
Advertisers are already adjusting budgets around it. Branded keyword cost-per-click rose about 5% in the third quarter. Google's own search ad revenue grew just 12%, its slowest quarter of the year, according to a follow-up ppc.land report.
Media buyer Lindsay Marty told Digiday the incremental 10 to 20% of branded search spend is "becoming less automatic." That's the easy money advertisers used to approve without a second look.
Another buyer, Bryce Hamlin, put the share of search budgets now under active reconsideration at 10 to 30%, a big chunk of a line item to question over a sidebar redesign. Farhad Divecha expects branded CPC to climb another 20 to 30% around Black Friday and Cyber Monday, right as this layout change beds in.
Google's own AI has already gotten a real person's facts wrong
This isn't the first time a Google-generated fact box has carried a mistake nobody at the company approved. In August 2026, a vandalized Wikipedia edit briefly fed Google's knowledge panel a false death date for OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman.
The error surfaced across search and drew a 30-plus-comment thread on r/google titled "Google search killed Sam Altman (he's fine)." OpenAI itself later acknowledged the incident to Reuters, calling for more transparency around how unintended AI output reaches the public.
That case was a knowledge panel, not an AI Overview, and the fix came fast once it was caught. But it's the same underlying problem. A fact box written by someone else's system pulls from sources a brand doesn't control, and it reaches millions of people before anyone checks it. Swap "vandalized Wikipedia edit" for "an AI model's own training data" and you get something close to what's sitting under Zillow's name this week.
Your competitors are getting cited by AI. You're not.
Every day without citation tracking is a day your competitors pull ahead in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude.
What to check about your own brand this week
Search your own brand name and read the right column the way a stranger would. Compare it against what you'd put in a knowledge panel yourself. Check the founding year, headquarters, pricing and who runs the place.
If a suggest-edits link shows up, use it. Don't expect an instant fix, since it's unclear yet whether that updates the underlying source or just flags the text for review.
If something is wrong, the fastest path is tracing it back to its source rather than arguing with the summary itself. A detailed walkthrough for correcting false AI Overview information covers how to find the page an error is pulling from and get it fixed there, since the AI tends to follow once the source changes.
The real problem isn't catching this once. It's knowing when it happens again, since a brand's AI Overview can drift back toward wrong once a new source gets scraped.
RankControl's AI visibility tracking checks what ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's own AI Overviews say about your brand every week, including the wording now sitting in that right column. A new mistake shows up in a weekly check instead of four days later on someone else's blog post. You can run this check yourself every week by hand. Or you can let RankControl's agents do it on a schedule while you work on the business the summary is supposed to describe.
The bigger shift this is part of
Knowledge panels were built from structured data a brand could at least partly shape, things like a Wikidata entry, a verified Google Business Profile, a claimed panel. That infrastructure, covered in RankControl's guide to earning a brand entity through Wikipedia and Wikidata, still feeds what AI Overviews draw from, even as the box on screen changes. The sourcing hasn't moved. The writing has.
Call it the silent handoff. Nothing was announced and nothing can be opted out of yet. The box that used to answer to a brand's own submitted facts now answers to a language model's best guess instead. Zillow's two-year gap is small. The next brand's might not be.
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