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AI Overviews Crushed France's Click-Through Rates in Just 9 Days
Publication date: 25.09.2026
In short
- Ahrefs analysed 963 French domains over the 9 days after AI Overviews launched in France on 22 July.
- Sites appearing in AI Overviews for more than 20% of their queries lost a median 23.1% of CTR, while lightly affected domains were practically untouched.
- Health content took the worst of it: a 20.4% CTR drop with AI Overviews shown on 22.2% of queries.
Before 22 July, when AI Overviews officially launched in France, Ahrefs collected baseline figures for the 963 highest-traffic domains in the country over the preceding 28 days.
The comparison was day by day, pinned to the exact launch date rather than to quarterly averages. Ahrefs writes that nine days later, sites appearing in AI Overviews for more than 20% of their queries had lost a median 23.1% of CTR.
Overall CTR across the sample fell by 3.4%, while the control group actually rose by 2.3%. The damage is concentrated on sites that frequently end up under an AI overview; the rest of the market barely felt it.
23.1%median CTR drop over 9 days for domains with high AI Overviews exposure
The loss scales with exposure
- The relationship is close to linear: roughly one point of CTR is lost for each point of AI Overviews exposure.
- 82.2% of highly exposed domains recorded a CTR decline.
- 48% of sites in the sample lost more than 10% of daily clicks, 19% more than 30%, and 5% more than half.
That is the study's main practical detail. The CTR loss does not work like a switch — "an AI overview appears, the clicks stop" — it scales with how often a given domain shows up there.
Median exposure across the whole sample is only 5.4%, though for 29% of domains it has already passed 10%.
So a site owner can gauge their own risk simply by looking at the share of queries where an AI overview appears for them. It is a measurable number rather than an abstract threat from someone else's article. That is why, in our list of metrics worth tracking instead of raw traffic, the share of queries with AI Overviews now sits next to classic rankings.
Health content suffered most
The worst numbers are in health: 22.2% of queries there come with an AI overview, and CTR fell by 20.4%.
The logic is simple: short factual answers like "what are the symptoms of…" or "what dose of…" are easy for Google to summarise right in the results, and the user often no longer needs to visit a site.
The same applies to legal and financial advice sites: a short, unambiguous query is just as easy to compress into a couple of sentences of an AI overview.
For e-commerce or local businesses with longer, less formalised queries the picture is gentler, but organic visibility still increasingly depends on how easily the answer compresses into two sentences.
What these 23% do not show
The sample is the 963 largest French domains, that is, the top of the market. The study does not say how smaller sites are faring, and they are usually hit harder.
Nine days is a short window. Separating the AI Overviews effect from ordinary July fluctuations over that span is hard, and Ahrefs itself sells a tool that measures exactly this exposure share.
I'd start that line in my own reporting right now, while exposure in Ukraine is still low: without a baseline taken before the rollout there will be nothing to compare against later.
Ahrefs concludes by calling it a move towards zero-click search that France has just joined. The open question is how quickly other markets will accumulate the same exposure, so that the numbers there become just as visible.
