On July 22, 2026, France became the latest major search market to get AI Overviews.
Which means that, for once, we got to watch the before and after without having to guess. In most markets, AI Overviews crept in alongside algorithm updates and seasonal swings, and we all spent the following year arguing about how much they had really cost us. France had a launch date, and we were already tracking: 963 domains in Google Search Console, over the 28 days before the launch and the 9 days after it.
Xibeijia Guan, our data scientist, pulled and analysed the data for French sites (we explain how in the methodology at the end of this study). Less than a month after launch, Google’s AI Overviews are already eating into click-through rates in France.
The domains most exposed to AI Overviews lost more than a fifth of their click-through rate in nine days. The ones barely exposed hardly moved at all.
So this isn’t an algorithm update. It’s AI Overviews.
Find where an AI Overview shows up in your SERPs
Use the SERP features filter to see exactly which of your rankings trigger an AI Overview. Head to the Organic keywords report in Site Explorer, then select AI Overview in the SERP features filter.
Results
Across the domains we studied, click-through rate fell 3.4% in nine days.
For the domains most exposed to AI Overviews, it fell 23.1%. Six times as much.
And this isn’t a handful of unlucky sites dragging the average down: 82.2% of highly exposed domains lost CTR. At that level of exposure, getting away with it has become the exception.
How to estimate what you’ll lose
In between those two extremes, the relationship holds pretty steady. If you compare the change in CTR against each domain’s AI Overview rate across all 963 domains, you get a slope of −0.9.
In other words: every extra point of AI Overview exposure costs you roughly one point of click-through rate.
If 15% of your queries trigger an AI Overview, expect to lose somewhere around 15% of your CTR. It’s crude, but it’s actionable: pull your exposure rate from Site Explorer and you have your order of magnitude.
A slope is not a prediction. Some heavily exposed sites are doing fine, and some barely exposed ones are falling apart for reasons that have nothing to do with AI. Your AI Overview rate is a risk factor, not a verdict. We’ll check back in a few months to see how these sites actually fared.