Brand AI Overview Hijack Scanner: Who Google's AI Cites for Your Brand

$0.50 per brand scanned. Brands with zero Google results are free.

Search your brand name on Google and the AI Overview often cites Reddit, Trustpilot, YouTube and your competitors' "alternatives" pages instead of you. This Actor runs the brand searches that decide deals ("{brand}", "{brand} reviews", "{brand} pricing", "is {brand} legit", "{brand} alternatives", plus your own), reads each AI Overview and its cited sources, and scores how badly the brand's story has been taken over.

What does it do?

For each brand it reports:

• hijackRisk 0-100 and hijackLevel (low / medium / high)
• ownCitationShare: the share of AI Overview citations that point to the brand's own site
• competitorsCited and outrankedOnBrandQueriesBy: competitors, comparison and affiliate pages showing up on the brand's own searches
• reviewAndForumSitesCited: Reddit, YouTube, Trustpilot, G2 and similar
• negativeMentions: complaint, scam, refund, hidden-fee wording inside the AI Overview, with the snippet
• ownRankForBrandName in organic results
• fixes: what to publish to win the citations back

Who is it for?

GEO / AI SEO agencies (it is a ready-made reason to call a prospect), brand and PR teams, and SaaS marketers watching their "alternatives" and "reviews" searches.

How much does it cost?

Event	Price	What you get
Brand scanned	$0.50	One brand checked across up to 10 brand searches with the full AI Overview analysis and fixes

Google Search + AI Overview results come from apify/google-search-scraper, which runs as a sub-run on your Apify account (a few cents per brand at the default 5 searches) and is capped inside each run. Set a maximum charge per run in the Console to cap spend.

Input example

{
  "brands": [
    "Gusto | gusto.com | rippling.com, adp.com",
    "Jobber | getjobber.com | housecallpro.com"
  ],
  "countryCode": "us"
}

Line format: Brand | domain | competitor1, competitor2. Competitors are optional; anything that looks like a "vs" or "alternatives" page is flagged anyway.

Output

One dataset row per brand: brand, domain, queriesScanned, aiOverviewsFound, aiOverviewsCitingOwnSite, ownCitationShare, hijackRisk, hijackLevel, topThirdPartyCited, competitorsCited, reviewAndForumSitesCited, negativeMentions, ownRankForBrandName, outrankedOnBrandQueriesBy, fixes, flags. Key-value store: REPORT_MD, REPORT_HTML, REPORT_JSON (includes every query's AI Overview text and sources).

Sample output (live run, Nov 3, 2026)

brand	AI Overviews	own citation share	hijackRisk	top third-party sources	competitors cited
Gusto	4 of 5	17%	64 (high)	youtube.com 10x, reddit.com 2x, trustpilot.com 2x	business.com, deelo.ai
Jobber	5 of 5	10%	77 (high)	youtube.com 13x, reddit.com 4x, facebook.com 3x	workever.com, fieldrocket.us

Jobber ranks #1 for its own name, but on its brand searches it is outranked by reddit.com, trustpilot.com and housecallpro.com, and the "Jobber reviews" AI Overview contains complaint wording ("A frequent complaint...").

FAQ

Which country? Any Google country via countryCode / languageCode.

Can I change the searches? Yes, edit queryTemplates; {brand} is replaced with the brand name (up to 10 searches per brand).

Use it from n8n, Make, Claude or Cursor

• MCP: add https://mcp.apify.com/?actors=growth-installations/brand-ai-overview-hijack-scanner to Claude, Cursor or any MCP client.
• n8n or Make: add an HTTP Request step that POSTs your input JSON to the API endpoint below and returns the dataset items.
• API: POST https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/growth-installations~brand-ai-overview-hijack-scanner/run-sync-get-dataset-items with header Authorization: Bearer <your Apify API token>