AI Overviews France: -23,1 % CTR — the recovery plan
Summarize this article with AI
The shock is measured: -23,1 % in 9 days
23,1 %. That’s the number I’ve been looking at since this morning.
Not 2%. Not 5%. Twenty-three point one. In nine days.
On July 22, 2026, France received AI Overviews. Google rolled out its generative answers at the top of results. And for the first time, we could observe the before and after without guessing. No algorithm update to blur the lines. No seasonality. Just the arrival of AI Overviews.
The Ahrefs study, led by Juliette Begue and Xibeijia Guan, tracked 963 French domains. 28 days before the launch. 9 days after. The result is clear. The most exposed domains lost 23,1 % click-through rate. While barely exposed domains hardly moved.
A variation like that can’t be explained by noise. The French market just shifted.
When you track 963 domains in Search Console, you’re not talking about isolated cases. You’re talking about the French market. The study has a rare strength: it isolates the AI Overviews effect. No core update in parallel. No seasonal spike on queries. Only one variable changes.
I’ve seen the same mechanics with my clients for months. When a generative answer appears on a strategic query, the page still shows up. It just loses the click. The user already has their answer.
82,2 % of highly exposed domains lost CTR. On that segment, coming out without losing becomes the exception.
Yesterday, a client sent me his export. 31 strategic queries. 9 trigger an AI Overview. His CTR on those 9 queries dropped 14 points in seven days. He thought it was a penalty. The ranking didn’t move. It’s just the AI Overview. Order of magnitude I’ve observed with my clients.
It’s measurable, and well. The AI Overviews exposure rate is calculated in Ahrefs, in the Organic keywords report, with the SERP features filter: AI Overview. You see exactly which queries trigger a generative answer on your pages.
I start there. A recovery plan is built on your exposure rate, not on an average. A site at 4 % doesn’t have the same work ahead as a site at 18 %.
Not looking costs more than looking. You gain by putting the numbers on the table.
Here, I’m giving you a field plan. We’ll understand the decoupling between impressions and clicks. Then see who loses the most. And apply the playbook by exposure level. The most exposed first.
And you, do you know your exposure rate today?
Impressions up, clicks down: the great decoupling
The anomaly is obvious. Impressions stay stable. Sometimes they go up. Clicks, however, drop.
In the study, nobody lost their positions at the end of July. Pages continue to appear. Sometimes more often. They just receive fewer clicks.
The most extreme case in the French panel? +183 % impressions. -1,9 % clicks. Click-through rate divided by more than three.
We’re not losing the ranking battle. We’re losing the attention battle.
Ahrefs had already documented this « great decoupling » in 2025. The AI Overview doesn’t remove your page from the result. It makes it redundant within the result. The user reads the answer at the top. They no longer need to click.
The issue was redundancy, not position.
AI Overviews don’t delete pages. They absorb informational intent. And often, they turn transactional intent into comparison intent.
For an e-commerce merchant, it means the user no longer clicks on the product page. They read the answer, compare prices, then go to the mentioned brand. Or come back later. The direct click fragments.
I’ve seen product pages lose 15 % of clicks while their impressions increased 40 %. Not because of content. Because of the generative answer above. Order of magnitude I’ve observed with my clients.
What to do? Two directions. First: be the source of that answer. Second: offer what the answer cannot give. Comparators, up-to-date price tables, verified reviews, interactive tools.
I’m already deploying this on high-exposure sites.
We’re not going to try to « recover » the click by pushing the page higher. It’s already there. We’ll work on getting cited in the answer. Or making the page so useful that the click becomes logical again.
Two directions. A page that starts with a direct 40-word answer, then expands, is citable. A page that offers an interactive comparator, proprietary data, detailed reviews, becomes clickable again.
The work starts there.
Who loses the most? Health first, then exposure
The study says it plainly. Health is the hardest-hit sector. Medical queries trigger massive AI Overviews. For an online pharmacy, a health insurance site, a health content publisher, the shock is immediate.
Why health? Medical queries trigger long, cautious answers with multiple sources. The user reads the summary. They don’t click on the insurance or pharmacy site. The content is swallowed.
Other sectors follow. E-commerce, finance, legal. As soon as a factual answer can be synthesized, the click drops.
Then, the sector matters less than exposure.
Across the panel, median CTR drops 5,7 %. Clicks drop 8,8 %. But this reassuring median hides a brutal distribution.
The important point: the loss is not uniform. The distribution observed on the Ahrefs panel:
| Daily click loss | Panel share |
|---|---|
| More than 10 % | 48 % |
| More than 30 % | 19 % |
| More than 50 % | 5 % |
48 % of domains lost more than 10 % of their daily clicks. 19 % more than 30 %. 5 % more than 50 %. One in two sites lost more than 10 %. One in twenty lost half. In nine days.
And exposure will keep climbing. The median exposure rate today is 5,4 %. 29 % of domains are already above 10 %. Since 2024, these numbers have only moved in one direction.
The relationship is almost linear between exposure and loss. Ahrefs measured a slope of -0,9. In plain terms: each additional point of exposure costs about one point of click-through rate.
If 15 % of your queries trigger an AI Overview, expect to lose about 15 % CTR. It’s rough but actionable. Use it as your order of magnitude.
Careful. A slope is not a prediction. Some highly exposed sites do well. Some lightly exposed sites collapse for other reasons. Your exposure rate is a risk factor, not a verdict.
The exposure number doesn’t say what will happen. It says where to look first.
So, where do you look? Pages that trigger AI Overviews. Queries where your answer is redundant. And content Google already cites without giving you the click.
The level-by-level plan will address these three points.
Voici comment je structure toute la réponse, du diagnostic à l’action. Un plan en deux temps : mesurer d’abord, puis travailler niveau par niveau, les plus exposés en premier.
Le plan de récupération en deux temps
Mesurer l’exposition, puis agir selon le niveau
Level 1: the plan for the most exposed domains
Who is at level 1? Domains with an exposure rate above 10 %. They already account for 29 % of the panel. And they’re the ones absorbing the heaviest losses.
For them, no half measures. Three workstreams.
Workstream 1: identify the pages that feed AI Overviews. In Ahrefs, filter your queries by the SERP feature AI Overview. Export the list. Cross-reference with your revenue-generating pages. You have your starting list. Not 200 pages. Often 20 to 30 strategic pages.
Workstream 2: make these pages citable. Generative answers cite sources that show structured data, clear definitions, bullet lists, comparison tables. A page that opens with a direct answer in the first 60 words, an anchor table of contents, an updated data table, structured data markup FAQ, HowTo, Product: it’s far more likely to be cited.
What I check first: the presence of a direct answer in the first 60 words, an anchor table of contents, an updated data table, structured data markup FAQ, HowTo, Product.
Workstream 3: create pages that AI Overview cannot replace. An interactive comparator. A dosage calculator. A criteria-based selection tool. Proprietary data. Detailed customer reviews. The generative answer synthesizes. It doesn’t test anything, doesn’t calculate anything, doesn’t compare in real time.
Level 1 is a real workstream. It’s a priority.
A health client, highly exposed, restructured 14 pages with these three workstreams. In three weeks, clicks went back up on 9 of them. Order of magnitude: +11 % clicks on that segment. CTR stabilized.
We didn’t delete anything. We made these pages useful beyond the generative answer.
You endure, or you react.
Does your site exceed 10 % exposure? This workstream starts today.
Levels 2 and 3: strengthen positions without panicking
Not everyone lost 23 %. If your exposure rate is between 5 % and 10 %, you’re at level 2. Below 5 %, level 3. The shock is real for some. But the room for maneuver is much larger.
What I do on these accounts.
Level 2 — moderate exposure. Monitor the AI Overview filter weekly on your top 10 queries. The generative answer moves fast. One week it cites a competitor. The next week it changes sources. You need to know when it cites you.
Then polish rich snippets. Featured snippet, FAQ, reviews, product. Pages that land a snippet gain visibility, even with the AI Overview in place. The goal: occupy two spaces in the result.
And work on brand signals. AI Overviews often cite brands already cited elsewhere. Press articles, verified reviews, active business profiles. Here we’re building an entity, not classic link building.
- Weekly monitoring on your top 10 queries. Who is cited? Which source?
- Rich snippets, with featured snippet, FAQ, reviews, product. Occupy two spaces in the result.
- Brand signals, via press, verified reviews, active profiles. AI Overviews cite brands already cited elsewhere.
- Internal linking to push strategic pages, not volume.
Level 3 — low exposure. The reflex is simple: don’t break what works. Lightly exposed sites have barely moved. Their priority: document. Measure exposure rate monthly. Spot queries that start triggering an AI Overview. Prepare pages in advance.
A point I observe often: on an e-commerce site with 4 200 references, only 7 % of queries generate an AI Overview. But that 7 % drives 38 % of organic revenue. I treat value, not volume.
Priority rule — we target value, not volume. A query that triggers an AI Overview and generates 30 orders per month is worth more than 50 queries without AI Overview that don’t convert.
For levels 2 and 3, the plan is progressive: measure, adjust, build brand presence, then wait.
But don’t wait idly.
Do you know where your site stands?
What I implement with my clients
I look at 15 sites per week. Right now, almost all share the same commonality. Their exposure rate has been climbing since July 22. Their CTR follows the same slope: -0,9.
When a client calls me with their Ahrefs numbers in hand, here’s what I do.
First, I calculate the exposure rate on transactional queries. Not on the whole site. On the pages that bring revenue. A dietary supplements shop, for example. 17 % global exposure. But 31 % on its 25 most profitable category queries. That’s where we act.
Then, I compare pages losing clicks with those that don’t. There’s always a pattern. Losing pages are often descriptive: no structured data, no tables, no reviews. Pages that hold up are rich, interactive, or cited in forums and social networks.
Third step, I rebuild losing pages in three layers.
- The direct answer at the top, to be citable.
- The structured data block, to occupy rich snippets.
- The exclusive value at the bottom: comparator, tool, proprietary data, reviews.
On an auto parts site, we restructured 6 category pages like this. Click-through rate rose 7,1 points in 21 days. Impressions stayed stable. Clicks went back up. That’s the order of magnitude I observe with my clients.
It’s all in the sequencing. We don’t redo the whole site. We redo the pages that feed the generative answer and that generate revenue. About 10 % of pages, for 70 % of the stake.
And you, do you know which pages Google cites in its AI Overviews?
The tipping point: what you measure today
What happened in France on July 22, 2026, is a tipping point. AI Overviews are here. They’re not going away. They will expand to more queries and gain other sectors.
This tipping point doesn’t mark the end of SEO. It changes the practice.
Before, we optimized for position. Now, we optimize to be the source. Before, we sought the direct click; today, we seek the citation, visibility in the answer, and the complementary click. And we no longer produce just content: we produce structured answers, proprietary data, tools.
SEO is shifting.
The recovery plan always starts with a measurement. Your AI Overviews exposure rate. Your cited pages. Your ignored pages. Your triggering queries. Your queries that resist.
Then, we prioritize. The most exposed first. The most profitable next. The rest, we document and wait.
You gain by acting now. Every week, exposure increases. And each point of exposure costs about one point of CTR.
I’m not selling you the method. I’m showing you the pages.
So: open Ahrefs, filter AI Overview, and look. What is your exposure rate?
AI Overviews Audit: measure your real exposure
I calculate your exposure rate on your strategic queries and show you the pages to restructure first.
Book a strategic call — 45 minFrequently Asked Questions
What are AI Overviews in France?
AI Overviews are Google’s generative answers. They appear at the top of results since July 22, 2026. The answer comes before the blue links.
How do I calculate my AI Overviews exposure rate?
In Ahrefs, I go through Site Explorer, then Organic keywords, and I filter on the SERP feature AI Overview. Then I divide the number of queries with AI Overview by my total queries.
Should I delete pages that lose clicks?
No. The generative answer makes the page redundant, so it loses clicks. Two options: I restructure it to be cited, or I add what no one else has—comparator, tool, proprietary data.
Will AI Overviews replace traditional SEO?
No. They shift the work. SEO becomes what makes a page citable and useful beyond the answer. Positions, structured data, and brand signals still matter.
Where do I start if my site lost 20 % CTR?
First identify pages that trigger an AI Overview and that convert. There, the plan is always the same: direct answer, structured data, content found nowhere else. Then measure within 3 weeks.
