ChatGPT and Google Brand Changes Still Rely on Outside Sources, Victorious Says

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.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA, UNITED STATES, November 13, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — OpenAI launched Businesses in ChatGPT in beta on Nov. 10. Verified companies can now claim a profile, update details such as their description and category, add product feeds, and see how often ChatGPT cites their website. Eight days earlier, Search Engine Roundtable reported that Google had moved AI Overviews for many brand searches into the right-hand column of desktop results, the space where knowledge panels have traditionally appeared. Google has not announced the change.

Both platforms still write their main answer about a company from a wider set of sources. OpenAI’s help center states that claiming a business does not guarantee more visibility or give the company direct control over ChatGPT’s independent recommendations, and that ChatGPT may draw on other sources when answering questions about a business. The Business Agent a company can build runs as a separate, labeled conversation, distinct from ChatGPT’s own answers. On Google, a company can suggest edits to a claimed knowledge panel, but the AI Overview is generated from cited web pages and has no equivalent editing option.

More brand searches on Google now return an AI Overview, and most of what those answers cite comes from other websites. BrightEdge reported on Nov. 6 that AI Overviews appeared for 64 percent of 282 tracked brand and product names in late October, up from 19 percent in mid-August. A study of AI Overviews for 100 brand names, published Oct. 1 by Slate, found that 29 percent of citations pointed to the brand’s own website.

Victorious, an SEO and AEO agency that works on AI search visibility with mid-market and enterprise companies, has measured company websites losing ground across AI platforms. Its Q3 2026 Search Report, based on about 16,500 answers across nine AI platforms, showed company websites falling from 65.2 percent to 55.5 percent of citations on research-stage questions between the second and third quarters. Outside coverage also tracked with which brands appeared at all. Of the brands studied, 90.5 percent were never named in answers to their own category’s questions, and the number of websites mentioning and linking to a brand predicted which brands AI did name. The mentions and links finding is a correlation within the report’s cohort of brands.

Michael Transon, CEO of Victorious, has described how AI answers reach a company through those outside 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 said companies should start with the profiles they control on those 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 full 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
Victorious
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