AI Overviews Devastate French Click-Through Rates, Data Reveals

Paris, France – July 22, 2026 – The introduction of Google’s AI Overviews in France on July 22, 2026, has had a swift and significant negative impact on website click-through rates (CTR), according to a new analysis by Ahrefs. For the first time in a major search market, researchers were able to precisely measure the "before and after" effect of AI Overviews due to a clearly defined launch date. The study tracked 963 domains in Google Search Console for 28 days prior to and nine days following the AI Overview rollout.

The findings indicate that domains most exposed to AI Overviews experienced a dramatic decrease in CTR. Less than a month after implementation, these highly exposed domains saw their click-through rates plummet by over a fifth, a stark 23.1% decline within just nine days. In contrast, domains with minimal exposure to AI Overviews showed little to no change in their CTR, underscoring that the observed drop is directly attributable to the AI feature rather than a general algorithm update or seasonal fluctuation.

Across the entire panel of studied domains, the median CTR fell by 3.4% in the nine days post-launch. However, this overall figure masks a more severe reality for a significant portion of websites. A staggering 82.2% of highly exposed domains registered a loss in CTR, indicating that avoiding the negative impact of AI Overviews has become the exception rather than the rule.

The data suggests a clear, linear relationship between a domain’s exposure to AI Overviews and its loss of click-through rate. For every one percent increase in queries triggering an AI Overview, websites can expect to lose approximately one percent of their click-through rate. This "one-to-one" correlation provides a quantifiable metric for estimating potential losses. For example, a website seeing AI Overviews appear for 15% of its queries could anticipate a roughly 15% reduction in its CTR.

This phenomenon is characterized by an increase in impressions coupled with a decrease in clicks, a pattern previously observed in Ahrefs’ global studies and referred to as "the great decoupling." AI Overviews are not necessarily removing pages from search engine results pages (SERPs); instead, they are making them redundant within the SERP itself. One of the most extreme cases observed in the French study showed a domain experiencing a 183% increase in impressions but a 1.9% decrease in clicks, effectively dividing its CTR by more than three.

While the median CTR decline for the entire French market was 5.7%, and clicks dropped by 8.8%, this reassuring average hides a more concerning distribution. Nearly half of the websites studied lost more than 10% of their daily clicks in just nine days, with one in twenty experiencing a halving of clicks. Furthermore, the exposure to AI Overviews is projected to increase. Currently, the median AI Overview rate among studied domains is 5.4%, with 29% already exceeding 10% – a trend that has consistently moved in one direction across all markets since 2024. French domains specifically lost 12.3% of clicks at the median, indicating they are more vulnerable than international competitors in the same market.

The health sector emerged as the most severely impacted vertical. Health-related queries consistently show the highest AI Overview rate at 22.2%, leading to a significant 20.4% drop in CTR for this sector. This vulnerability is attributed to the nature of health queries, which are often informational, have concise answers that fit within an AI Overview, and typically do not require further user action beyond obtaining the immediate answer. The study emphasizes that the intent behind a query is a more significant determinant of its susceptibility to AI Overviews than the industry vertical. Queries answerable by a single paragraph are at high risk, while those requiring tools, accounts, pricing, or subjective opinions tend to fare better.

The impact of AI Overviews is not static and is expected to worsen over time. Global research tracking the effect over two years revealed that the decline in CTR for position one results escalated from 34.5% in spring 2025 to 58% by the end of 2025. This trend suggests that AI Overviews become more impactful as they trigger on a wider range of queries and users become accustomed to receiving information directly from the AI summary without needing to click through. There is no indication that France will deviate from this trajectory.

The methodology for the study involved analyzing data from 963 domains in Google Search Console, comparing the 28 days before July 22, 2026, with the nine days following the AI Overview launch. The reported 23.1% median CTR figure for highly exposed sites represents the raw observed change. When factoring in that the control group’s CTR actually rose by 2.3% during the same period, the true impact of AI Overviews on highly exposed sites is a more significant 24.8%.

In conclusion, the introduction of AI Overviews in France has created a measurable risk for websites, directly correlating with exposure. The study’s key takeaways are: the risk is quantifiable using tools like Ahrefs’ Site Explorer’s SERP features filter; impressions are not a reliable indicator of success, as CTR has been the primary casualty; and the observed magnitude of these losses aligns with findings from other research firms, suggesting a widespread trend of declining organic CTR. France has now joined other markets in experiencing this shift towards a "zero-click" search environment.