AI Overviews Cut CTR by 23.1% in France
France got AI Overviews on 22 July 2026, and the first nine days of data show what they cost publishers. Across 963 French domains tracked in Google Search Console, click-through rate fell 3.4% overall. For the domains most exposed to AI Overviews, those where more than a fifth of queries trigger one, CTR dropped 23.1%, roughly six times the average. Of those highly exposed domains, 82.2% lost CTR.
The pattern is consistent enough to estimate from. Comparing each domain's change in CTR against its AI Overview rate gives a slope of about minus 0.9, so every extra point of exposure costs roughly a point of click-through rate. A site with 15% of queries triggering an AI Overview should expect to lose around 15% of its CTR. Impressions held up or rose while clicks fell, meaning pages are still visible in results but users no longer need to visit them.
The median across the full panel was milder, at minus 5.7% CTR and minus 8.8% clicks, but the distribution is wide: nearly one site in two lost more than 10% of daily clicks, and one in twenty lost half. French .fr domains lost 12.3% of clicks at the median, against 8.8% for the panel as a whole. Health was the worst-hit sector, with an AI Overview rate of 22.2% and a CTR fall of 20.4%, because informational medical queries are the kind a single paragraph can answer.
The effect is expected to grow rather than settle. Earlier global tracking found the impact on position-one CTR deepening from minus 34.5% in spring 2025 to minus 58% by the end of that year, as AI Overviews trigger on more queries and users stop clicking. For brands, the practical read is that query intent matters more than industry: questions needing a tool, an account, a price or a human opinion hold up better than those with a short factual answer.
Reported by Ahrefs Blog ↗
Topics: AI Overviews, Google Search, Measurement