AI Overviews France: What 963 Domains Reveal After 9 Days

AI Overviews n’est pas arrivé en France par vagues : c’est un interrupteur, basculé le 22 juillet 2026. Reprenons la chronologie, parce qu’elle explique tout le reste.

On July 22, France Changed Its SERP

963 domains. 28 days before. 9 days after.

On July 22, 2026, Google deploys AI Overviews in France. Nothing gradual. A switch.

The Ahrefs study, published on September 16, 2026, tracked these 963 domains in Google Search Console. The data is signed by Juliette Begue and Xibeijia Guan. Two numbers to remember: 3.4% CTR lost across the whole panel. 23.1% CTR lost for the most exposed sites.

Nine days. Not six months. No algorithm update. A targeted rollout.

This study is rare. In most markets, AI Overviews arrived at the same time as algorithm updates and seasonal variations. France, on the other hand, had a launch date. We could observe before and after without guessing.

Low-exposure sites barely moved. Highly exposed sites dropped. The relationship is clear.

Another data point: the panel’s median exposure is 5.4%. And 29% of domains are already above 10% exposure. These numbers have only increased in every market since 2024.

You have pages ranking in France? You are affected. Even if you don’t see it yet.

Your ranking holds. It’s the clicks that collapse.

An AI Overview, concretely, is a box generated by Google at the top of results. It directly answers the question. No need to click. Your page remains below, in blue, but attention is already gone.

For an e-commerce site, it’s a matter of survival.

The study only covers France, but the mechanism is global. Other markets experienced it in 2024 and 2025. France is catching up all at once.

Each passing day, the AI box appears on more queries. July 22, the switch. July 31, already a 5.4% median exposure rate. That’s only a starting point.

23.1% CTR Lost: The Average Means Nothing

The average -3.4% CTR is reassuring. Wrongly.

The domains most exposed to AI Overviews lost 23.1% of their CTR in nine days. Six times the average.

And it’s not a handful of unlucky sites: 82.2% of highly exposed domains saw their click-through rate decline. At that exposure level, coming out unscathed has become the exception.

Exposure is the rate of queries that trigger an AI Overview. The higher this rate climbs, the worse the CTR loss gets. The slope is -0.9: each additional exposure point costs about one CTR point.

Concretely? If 15% of your queries trigger an AI Overview, count on about 15% less CTR. It’s raw. It’s actionable.

This is not a prediction. Some highly exposed sites do well. Others, low exposure, collapse for unrelated reasons. Your exposure rate is a risk factor, not a verdict.

The loss is not uniform. It depends on the type of query. Informational queries, direct questions, definitions: that’s where the AI Overview appears. Transactional queries remain more protected.

An e-commerce site with 10,000 monthly clicks and 12% exposure loses on the order of 10 to 15% of clicks. Not because of its content. Because of the new SERP architecture.

One note: the -0.9 slope was calculated across the 963 domains, not just at-risk sectors. The relationship holds. Even excluding sites that collapse for other reasons.

This coefficient is not a magic wand. It gives an order of magnitude, not a prediction to the nearest click. Enough to prioritize: know where the pressure is strongest.

Impressions Up, Clicks Down: The Decoupling Is Here

Almost no one lost rankings at the end of July. Pages still appear, as often as before. Sometimes more.

Except people click on them less.

The most extreme case in the French panel: +183% impressions, -1.9% clicks. CTR divided by more than three.

Nothing accidental. We find the pattern from Ahrefs’ global study, late 2025. The AI Overview doesn’t remove your page from results. It makes it redundant within them.

The user reads the answer in the box. They no longer need to click. Your page remains ranked. Your clicks, however, drop off.

I see the same thing on French SERPs since I settled in Southeast Asia. Positions hold. Clicks evaporate. And many site owners look at their rankings, not their clicks.

Mistake.

Ranking is no longer the point.

Why do impressions climb? Google shows the page more often, sometimes on broader queries. The user, on the other hand, no longer needs it. The impression becomes an artifact. It flatters reports. It doesn’t fill the cart.

A site that gains 50% impressions and loses 20% clicks has not progressed. It has been relegated to a notice.

Look at your reports. If your impressions climb since late July, compare with clicks before celebrating. Two diverging curves, that’s the signal.

The decoupling has a clear signature, measurable in your reports. The AI Overview leaves your positions in place. It chips away at the value of each.

A page in position 1 that is not the source cited by the AI becomes a secondary link. The user sees it, sometimes. They no longer click. The impression remains, the click evaporates.

The Reassuring Median Hides a Brutal Distribution

Across the whole panel, the median loss is 5.7% CTR and 8.8% clicks.

That looks manageable. Except this median hides another story.

Here is the distribution of daily click losses:

One in two sites lost more than 10% of its daily clicks. One in twenty lost half.

In nine days.

And exposure keeps climbing. Today, the panel median is at 5.4% of queries with AI Overview. 29% of domains are already above 10%. In every market since 2024, these numbers have been rising.

.fr domains take a harder hit. The median click loss for .fr domains is 12.3%, compared to 8.8% for the whole panel. French sites are more exposed than international players targeting the French market.

Why? A large share of .fr traffic is informational. Exactly the type of query where the AI Overview appears.

You manage a .fr site? You start with a handicap.

The study’s numbers are not distant predictions. They are losses already realized over 9 days. The worst is probably ahead.

This table doesn’t tell everything. The 48% of sites losing more than 10% of daily clicks are e-commerce sites, publishers, media, services. The problem affects the whole market, not a niche.

With a median loss of 12.3% for .fr, local players suffer the impact more strongly. International traffic targeting France is less informational, more transactional. It resists better.

Vous voulez savoir à quoi vous vous exposez ? Dix minutes suffisent, pas trois mois. Voici la méthode, étape par étape.

Estimate Your Loss in 10 Minutes

The -0.9 slope is far from academic. It’s a tool.

Each point of exposure to an AI Overview costs about one CTR point. If 15% of your queries trigger an AI Overview, expect to lose around 15% CTR. If 30%, around 30%.

It’s rough. But it works.

How do you do it?

• Open Ahrefs Site Explorer.
• Go to the Organic keywords report.
• Use the SERP features filter and select AI Overview.
• Calculate the percentage of your queries that trigger this filter.

That percentage is your exposure rate. Multiply it by your current CTR, and you get the order of magnitude of the loss to come.

Not a prediction, no. Some highly exposed sites do well. Others, low exposure, collapse for reasons unrelated to the AI. Your exposure rate is a risk factor, not a verdict.

Calculating your exposure rate on your own data is step 1.

Step 2 is to prioritize. Not all pages are equal in the face of AI. Pages that answer closed questions, definitions, symptoms, simple comparisons: those are the ones that trigger the most AI Overviews. Transactional pages, product sheets, category pages remain more protected.

It’s up to you to identify pages with high exposure and low transactional value. The loss concentrates there. And that’s where you need to make a cut.

Either you accept the loss. Or you change the page’s role.

Once the exposure rate is calculated, don’t stop. Download your filtered queries. Group them by page. You will immediately see the most threatened pages.

Don’t delete your informational content. Reconfigure it to serve as a source for the AI, instead of being the duplicate read below the AI Overview. A page that answers in 40 words, with a quantified data point and a clear structure, has a better chance of being cited than a 1,200-word page that drowns the answer.

The Health Sector, Hit First

According to the Ahrefs study, the health sector is the hardest hit.

Logical. Health queries are massively informational. Symptoms, treatments, dosages, definitions. The AI Overview answers them in a few lines, without the user needing to open a site.

A medical site ranking for « pain left side under the ribs » sees its page stay in position 3. Except the AI box already gives the answer. The click doesn’t come.

The health site publishers I follow see the same curve. Stable positions. Clicks falling. Ranking holds, traffic drops off.

The same mechanism affects recipes, simple tutorials, generic buying guides, « definition » pages.

Your content is not bad. It just became invisible where the user is looking.

The question is no longer « how to rank first? » It becomes « how to become the source the AI cites? »

The logic flipped all at once.

For a health site, the direct answer is no longer a distant threat. From the first week, the AI settled on thousands of queries. French medical content has become a reservoir of citations, not a click magnet.

Content that still ranks was often written for position. Not for citation. It says in 1,200 words what the AI summarizes in 60. It loses.

Health takes a hit for a specific reason: it’s the sector where trust weighs most, and where everything must move fast. The AI Overview gives an immediate answer, without advertising, without navigation. For the user, it’s a gain. For the site, it’s a dead loss.

But be careful: being cited in the AI Overview can become a traffic channel if the citation includes a link and if the site is recognized as a source. That’s the next battle.

What You Must Do Now

Look at your data. Not in thirty days. Today.

Calculate your exposure rate. Separate your pages into three groups: highly exposed, low exposure, not exposed.

For highly exposed pages, ask yourself a simple question: can this page become the source cited by the AI Overview? If yes, adapt the content. Answer in 40 words, from the first paragraph. Add a quantified data point and a clear definition. Google cites pages that answer.

If not, accept the click loss. Focus your efforts on transactional queries, product pages, conversion pages. That’s where the click survives.

We don’t fight against the AI Overview. We insert ourselves into it.

I’m not selling you the method. I’m showing you the pages.

And the pages, right now, all tell the same story.

July 22 is only the beginning. Exposure will climb. The study says it: the numbers have only increased in every market since 2024. The 9 days are a preview, not an anomaly.

In six months, the sites that have acted on citation, source, direct answer, will not be the ones that lost positions. They will be the ones that changed role.

Do you know how many of your queries trigger an AI Overview today?

The method I’ve been building since 2016 doesn’t stack pages for keywords. It occupies the semantic space of a sector. Today, that space includes the AI box. We must appear in it, not just below it.

Each page must now answer two questions: which query do I serve? What answer do I give in three sentences? If you can’t answer the second, you’re already losing the first.

Stéphane Jambu

SEO & AI Engineer

I build growth systems / AI / Neuroscience | 650+ clients · 80 LinkedIn testimonials · 30 years of expertise · 15 years of systems running without me.

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