AI Overviews Cite Trust Signals, Not Just Rankings

What happened

Freshpet is getting named by Google's AI Overviews in searches like [best fresh dog food] and [best refrigerated dog food], and on August 20 the company's digital team will walk through exactly how they got there, according to reporting from Search Engine Journal published August 6, 2026. Steven Elwell, Freshpet's Senior Director of Digital Marketing, will co-present with Brittni Ratliff and Cosima Compton of Intero Digital, the agency behind the brand's GEO work.

The core finding, per the report: ranking well and getting cited by AI are two different jobs. A brand can sit at #1 in the organic results while the AI Overview above it names three competitors instead, because citation depends on trust signals the model can verify about the brand, not on where it lands in the SERP.

Why it matters for marketers

This lines up with what CMO Mag found when we looked at how often AI models recognize brands but skip citing them: recognition is common, citation is rare. Brand equity built over years of category leadership does not automatically carry into an AI answer. If your team is optimizing purely for SERP position, you may be winning a fight that no longer decides who gets named.

What to do this week

According to the SEJ report, Freshpet's own audit process was designed to be run by one person with no special tooling, checking where AI answers were quietly costing the brand market share. That's a workable model for any team without a GEO budget. Pair it with the structured tactics in our answer engine optimization playbook to identify which of your category's queries are already triggering AI Overviews, then check whether your brand shows up in the citation, not just the ranking.