AI Overviews: -58% CTR, and France Is Next (Summer 2026)

What the CTR studies actually measure

The numbers converge from one study to the next, with independent methodologies:

The honest reading of this table fits in three sentences. The classic organic click collapses when a generated answer appears. The traffic doesn't vanish entirely: it shifts to the cited sources, which come out ahead (+35% per Bain). And the deterioration between 2025 (-34.5%) and 2026 (-58%) shows that users increasingly trust the generated answer.

Which queries trigger an AI Overview?

According to Semrush's tracking of 10 million keywords, AI Overview prevalence rose from 6.5% of queries in January 2025 to a peak of roughly 25% in July 2025, before settling around 16-18% in 2026. The profile of affected queries is shifting: 91% were purely informational in early 2025, but the share of commercial and transactional intents is climbing steadily. More than 40% of informational queries now trigger an Overview (Ahrefs). As for AI Mode, the conversational successor launched worldwide at Google I/O 2026, Semrush measures that 93% of its sessions are zero-click.

Why was France spared, and what changed on June 29, 2026?

AI Overviews, launched in the United States in May 2024 and rolled out to Germany, Italy, Spain, and Switzerland in March 2025, were still not live in France as of June 2026. And at Google I/O 2026 (May 19-20), Google launched AI Mode worldwide while explicitly excluding France and part of the EU.

The reason is legal: press neighboring rights. France's 2019 law requires Google to pay publishers for reusing their content; the Autorité de la concurrence (France's competition authority) already fined Google 250 million euros in March 2024 for breaching its commitments, notably for training Gemini on press content. The renewed agreement with the APIG in January 2025 (295 publications) didn't remove the risk: displaying generated answers that summarize the French press would expose Google to fresh litigation. Add European competition scrutiny, plus a "double opt-out" mechanism for publishers under study since January 2026, validated in principle by the UK's CMA.

Update, July 1, 2026: the lock has broken. In an official letter sent to French press publishers on June 29, 2026 (revealed by Ouest-France, confirmed by Les Échos and Le Monde), Google announced that AI Overviews and AI Mode will roll out in France during the summer of 2026, no later than September 23. The agreement rests on three commitments: a per-publisher opt-out via Search Console (declining the use of your content in AI features with no ranking penalty), separate performance metrics for AI and classic search, and continued neighboring-rights compensation. Should you exercise that opt-out? Our full analysis, AI Overviews Opt-Out: Should You Pull Your Site?, settles the question with the numbers. The three workstreams below are therefore no longer preparation: they're a countdown.

The other side: cited brands come out ahead

The picture isn't uniformly bleak, and that's the point the alarmist takes miss. The studies also measure the opposite effect for the sources that appear inside the generated answer: Bain & Company puts it at +35% organic clicks and +91% paid clicks for brands cited in an AI Overview. The aggregate CTR data tells the same story: a cited source sees its click-through rate climb from roughly 0.6% to over 1%, while uncited results sink.

In other words, AI Overviews don't destroy the value of the SERP: they concentrate it. The competition shifts from "being in the top 10" to "being one of the three to five sources in the answer." A more brutal game, but one where the criteria are known: strong E-E-A-T (96% of citations per Ahrefs), answer-first formatting, original sourced data, entity density. The same concentration mechanism plays out on ChatGPT and Perplexity, already live in France.

Featured snippets, local pack: history repeats itself

Zero-click search wasn't born with generative AI. Featured snippets (2014), the knowledge graph, the local pack, and People Also Ask boxes had already moved a growing share of answers directly into the SERP: even before AI Overviews, more than half of Google searches ended without a click. At every stage, the script was the same: industry panic, adaptation by the best, a premium for sites structured to be the source of the answer. Yesterday's position zero is the direct ancestor of today's generative citation, and the winning reflexes haven't changed: answer fast, prove it, structure it. AI Overviews change the scale of the phenomenon, not its nature.

Three workstreams to complete before the (now dated) arrival of Overviews

1. Become a cited source outside France: your export markets (Germany, Spain, Italy, UK, US) already live under AI Overviews. Every localized answer-first page there is a full-scale laboratory: it's the intersection of our international SEO and our AI SEO offer.
2. Map your future exposure: identify which of your French queries are informational (and therefore certain to trigger an Overview at rollout) and which are transactional or local, where the click will stay intact. Rebalance your editorial portfolio accordingly: it's exactly the intent-by-intent work we do for dentists and law firms.
3. Set up citation tracking now: ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini already work in France. Your generative share of voice is being built today; the models preferentially cite the sources they already know. Waiting for the Overviews rollout to get started means competing two years behind.

FAQ: AI Overviews and CTR

Are AI Overviews available in France?

Not yet, but it's imminent: on June 29, 2026, Google announced their rollout in France during the summer, no later than September 23, 2026, following an agreement with publishers on neighboring rights. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini already work normally for French users.

How much do AI Overviews reduce CTR?

-58% for the first organic position according to Ahrefs (February 2026), with a negative impact across the top ten positions. The Seer Interactive and Authoritas studies measure comparable orders of magnitude, between -47% and -65%.

How do you get featured in an AI Overview?

By combining strong E-E-A-T (96% of citations come from such sources per Ahrefs), answer-first formatting, sourced data points, and high entity density. Ranking well isn't enough: 88% of URLs cited by LLMs aren't in Google's top 10.

When will AI Overviews arrive in France?

During the summer of 2026, between late June and September 23, per Google's official letter to publishers dated June 29, 2026. Publishers will have an opt-out via Search Console. We'll date the actual rollout here as soon as it's observed on French SERPs.

Does zero-click search doom SEO?

It dooms purely position-based SEO. Visibility shifts from the blue link to the citation inside the answer: an asset that can be measured (generative share of voice) and worked on, just like rankings were yesterday.

What's the difference between AI Overviews and AI Mode?

An AI Overview is a generated answer block displayed above the classic SERP results. AI Mode, launched worldwide at Google I/O 2026, is a full conversational experience that replaces the SERP: you chat with it as you would with ChatGPT, and 93% of its sessions end without a single click to a website (Semrush). It's the next act, and it makes the work of being citable even more decisive.

Are my local and transactional queries at risk?

Far less: Overviews trigger overwhelmingly on informational queries, while local intents (the Google Maps pack) and transactional intents keep the bulk of their clicks. That's what makes arbitrating your query portfolio so profitable: knowing where the click will survive drives the entire editorial plan.

Sources: Ahrefs (Feb. 2026), Semrush (2025), Seer Interactive (Sept. 2025), Bain & Company (2025), Autorité de la concurrence (March 2024), Google I/O 2026, Google's letter to publishers dated June 29, 2026 (via Ouest-France, Les Échos). Facts last verified: July 1, 2026.

Written by Éric St-Cyr, founder of ProStar SEO and Agence SEO Paris — LinkedIn profile.