AI Overviews Devastate French Search Click-Through Rates, Data Reveals

France has become the latest major search market to experience the significant impact of Google’s AI Overviews, with data collected by Ahrefs showing a dramatic decline in click-through rates (CTR) for exposed domains. Launched on July 22, 2026, the rollout in France provided a unique opportunity to observe the "before and after" effects without the usual ambiguity of gradual algorithm changes.

Over a period of 28 days preceding the launch and nine days following it, Ahrefs tracked 963 domains in Google Search Console to analyze the immediate consequences of AI Overviews. Xibeijia Guan, Ahrefs’ data scientist, spearheaded the analysis of French websites, employing a methodology detailed at the end of the study. The findings indicate that within less than a month, AI Overviews are already significantly eroding click-through rates across the French digital landscape.

Domains most heavily exposed to AI Overviews saw their click-through rates plummet by more than a fifth (23.1%) in just nine days. In stark contrast, domains with minimal exposure to these AI-generated summaries experienced negligible changes, underscoring that the observed decline is directly attributable to AI Overviews and not a general algorithm update or seasonal fluctuation.

Key Findings and Data Analysis

Across the entire panel of studied domains, the average click-through rate experienced a fall of 3.4% in the nine days following the AI Overview launch. However, for those domains most exposed to AI Overviews, this decline was a staggering 23.1% – six times greater than the overall average. This impact is not confined to a small number of affected sites; a substantial 82.2% of highly exposed domains registered a loss in CTR, indicating that avoiding negative consequences at this level of exposure has become the exception rather than the rule.

The data reveals a consistent relationship between AI Overview exposure and CTR loss. For every additional point of AI Overview exposure across the 963 domains analyzed, there was a corresponding loss of approximately one point in click-through rate. This linear correlation suggests that if 15% of a domain’s queries trigger an AI Overview, an estimated 15% loss in CTR can be anticipated. While this is a simplified model, it offers actionable insights, allowing website owners to estimate their potential losses by assessing their exposure rate within tools like Ahrefs’ Site Explorer.

Impressions Surge, Clicks Decline: The "Great Decoupling" Continues

A critical observation is that rankings for most pages did not significantly drop following the AI Overview rollout. Pages continue to appear in search results with the same or even increased frequency. The issue lies not in visibility but in the reduced likelihood of users clicking through to these pages. This pattern mirrors findings from previous studies, including a global analysis conducted in late 2025 and the broader phenomenon dubbed "the great decoupling." AI Overviews, rather than removing content from search engine results pages (SERPs), render it redundant within the SERP itself. In extreme cases, some French domains experienced an 183% surge in impressions accompanied by a 1.9% decrease in clicks, effectively dividing their CTR by more than three.

Market-Wide Impact and Distribution of Losses

While the 23.1% CTR drop represents the experience of the most exposed minority, the overall market impact is still significant. The median CTR across the entire French panel fell by 5.7%, with a corresponding 8.8% decrease in clicks. However, this median figure masks a more severe distribution of losses. Nearly half of the analyzed domains experienced a decline of over 10% in their daily clicks within just nine days, and one in twenty suffered a loss of 50%.

The trend suggests that AI Overview exposure is likely to increase. Currently, the median AI Overview rate among the studied domains stands at 5.4%, with 29% already exceeding 10%. These figures have consistently trended upwards in every market where AI Overviews have been implemented since 2024. Notably, French domains (.fr) within the Ahrefs panel experienced a median click loss of 12.3%, surpassing the 8.8% loss for the panel as a whole. This indicates that French websites are more susceptible to the impact of AI Overviews compared to international entities operating within the same market.

Sector-Specific Vulnerability: Health Takes a Hit

The health sector has emerged as the most severely affected. Health-related queries exhibit an AI Overview rate of 22.2%, the highest recorded in the study, leading to a 20.4% drop in click-through rates. This vulnerability stems from the nature of health queries, which are often informational, possess concise answers, and do not typically lead directly to a transaction. AI Overviews are particularly adept at absorbing such content, providing users with the information they seek directly within the AI summary, thus eliminating the need to click through to external websites.

The determinant of a website’s fate appears to be less about its industry vertical and more about the user intent behind its queries. Queries that can be answered with a single paragraph are at high risk of being absorbed by AI Overviews. Conversely, queries requiring more in-depth engagement, such as those involving tools, account creation, price comparisons, purchases, or nuanced human opinions, tend to hold up better.

Escalating Impact and Future Projections

The observed CTR decline of 23.1% is likely not the worst-case scenario. Global research tracking the impact of AI Overviews over two years shows a consistent worsening trend. The effect on position 1 click-through rates escalated from a 34.5% decline in spring 2025 to 58% by the end of that year. This trend suggests that the impact of AI Overviews does not diminish over time; instead, it intensifies as they become integrated into a wider range of queries and users grow accustomed to receiving information without clicking through. There is no indication that France will deviate from this trajectory.

Methodology and Refined Impact

The reported 23.1% median CTR figure represents the raw observed change for the highly exposed group. During the same period, the control group’s CTR actually rose by 2.3%. When accounting for this concurrent lift, the actual negative impact of AI Overviews on highly exposed sites is a more severe 24.8%.

Conclusion: A Zero-Click Future for French Search

In the two weeks following the introduction of AI Overviews in France, the most exposed websites experienced a loss of one-fifth of their click-through rate, while minimally exposed sites remained largely unaffected. The relationship between AI Overview exposure and CTR loss is linear, with approximately one point of CTR lost for every point of exposure.

Three key takeaways emerge from this analysis:

1. Measurable Risk: The risk posed by AI Overviews is quantifiable. Tools like the SERP features filter in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer can identify a website’s exposure rate to AI Overviews before significant damage occurs.
2. Focus on Click-Through Rate: Impressions have not decreased; instead, click-through rates have borne the brunt of the impact. This necessitates a shift in focus from visibility metrics to engagement metrics.
3. Consistent Global Trends: The observed magnitudes of decline in France align with findings from other markets, with reports from Seer Interactive, Kevin Indig, and Authoritas indicating similar significant drops in organic CTR. The consistent pattern across multiple studies suggests a widespread shift towards zero-click search experiences.

France has now joined the growing number of markets experiencing this profound transformation in search behavior, signaling a continued move towards a zero-click search environment.