A study says AI Overviews recommend competitors 69% of the time. Here is the version without the panic.
A stat is making the rounds that is engineered to scare business owners: according to a study reported by ALM Corp in June 2026, when Google's AI Overviews answer a query related to a brand, they recommend competitors 69% of the time (news.google.com).
First, the honesty part, because that is what we are for: we have not seen the study's methodology, we do not know what query set produced that number, and secondhand percentages deserve skepticism on principle. "69% of the time" might describe a broad reality or a narrow experiment. Treat the number as a signal, not a measurement.
But the direction of the signal is worth taking seriously, because it matches how these systems visibly behave.
Why AI answers surface competitors at all
When someone asks an AI assistant about your product category, or even about you specifically, the engine assembles an answer from the sources it can read and trust. Comparison content, alternatives lists, review roundups, and category explainers are exactly the content those systems find easiest to cite. If the only well-structured, machine-readable pages about your category were written by your competitors or by affiliate sites comparing you unfavorably, the answer engine works with what it has.
In other words: the 69% is not the machine being against you. It is the machine reflecting who showed up.
What a small business can actually do
- Be the best source about yourself. A clear page that states plainly what you do, who it is for, what it costs, and how you differ is the raw material an engine needs to represent you accurately. Most business sites make machines guess.
- Answer the comparison question before someone else does. If people ask "you versus X" or "alternatives to X," the honest version of that page coming from you beats the affiliate version existing without you. Honest matters: engines and readers both punish puffery.
- Make sure the engines can read any of it. None of the above helps if AI crawlers are blocked, your content only renders with JavaScript, or your pages carry no trust signals. The plumbing comes first.
- Check what the machines currently see. Not what you think your site says, what a crawler actually receives when it asks for your pages.
The takeaway
Whatever the true percentage is, the underlying game is real: AI answers are becoming a recommendation layer, and presence in that layer is earned by being readable, specific, and trustworthy to machines. That is auditable. Our free scan reads your site exactly the way those engines do and tells you, in plain language, what is standing between you and being the source they cite, starting with whether they can see you at all.
Sources: ALM Corp via Google News, June 2026 (Google AI Overviews Recommend Competitors 69% of the Time: Study). Number reported secondhand; methodology not independently reviewed by us.