AI Overviews cut CTR 23.1% for exposed sites in France
Summary
France switched on AI Overviews on July 22, 2026. Ahrefs tracked 963 domains in Google Search Console for the 28 days before and the nine days after. Domains where more than 20% of queries trigger an AI Overview lost 23.1% of click-through rate.
The median domain across the whole panel lost 5.7%, and the control group with under 2% exposure gained 2.3%. One sitewide average hides the split.
What happened
France got AI Overviews on July 22, 2026, and Ahrefs used the date to run a clean before-and-after that the gradual rollouts elsewhere never allowed. Its study of the French rollout, published September 16, tracked 963 domains through aggregated Google Search Console data. The comparison is daily average clicks, impressions and CTR over the 28 days before launch against the nine days after.
Across the full panel, click-through rate fell 3.4%. Among domains where more than 20% of queries trigger an AI Overview, it fell 23.1%. Ahrefs reports that 82.2% of that highly exposed group lost CTR, so the drop is not a handful of outliers dragging an average down.
Rankings barely moved. Pages kept showing up, and often showed up more. The most extreme domain in the panel gained 183% more impressions while losing 1.9% of clicks, which left its CTR at under a third of what it was.
Why it matters
Every other market got AI Overviews gradually, alongside core updates and seasonal swings. Practitioners have spent a year arguing about how much of the drop belonged to which. France had a switch-on date and a panel that was already being tracked. Ahrefs also ran a control group of domains where under 2% of queries trigger an AI Overview, on the logic that whatever those domains lost is what everyone would have lost anyway. That control group’s CTR rose 2.3% over the same nine days.
Measurement design decides the number you get, which is the reason six studies of AI traffic reached six different conclusions.
The sitewide average is the wrong number to read here. Across the whole panel the median domain lost 5.7% of CTR and 8.8% of clicks, which sounds survivable. The distribution underneath it is not:
- 48% of the panel lost more than 10% of daily clicks
- 19% lost more than 30%
- 5% lost more than half
All of that happened in nine days.
One sector separates from the rest. Health carries the highest AI Overview rate in the study at 22.2%, and its click-through rate fell 20.4%. Ahrefs ties that to its earlier finding that 44.1% of medical queries trigger an AI Overview.
Intent decides the damage, not industry. A query that a single paragraph answers is a query you lose. A query that needs a tool, a price, an account or a human opinion holds up far better. The pattern lines up with evidence that AI Overview citations diverge from the classic top 10, because staying ranked no longer means staying clicked.
French domains took more of the hit than the international players competing in the same SERPs. The .fr sites in the panel lost 12.3% of clicks at the median against 8.8% panel-wide.
What to do
Pull your AI Overview exposure rate first. In Ahrefs Site Explorer, open the Organic keywords report and set the SERP features filter to AI Overview to see which rankings trigger one.
Then size the risk. Ahrefs found a slope of roughly minus 0.9 between exposure and CTR change across the 963 domains, so each extra point of AI Overview exposure costs about a point of click-through rate. At 15% exposure, plan for a loss somewhere near 15%.
Rebuild the same comparison for your own market in Search Console. Filter by country, split the query set by whether an AI Overview appears, and anchor your before and after windows to that market’s rollout date. A sitewide trend line mixes exposed and unexposed queries and shows you something like the panel-wide 3.4%, not the 23.1% hitting the exposed pages.
Then rank your queries by how answerable they are in one paragraph. That sort tells you more about what is at risk than your vertical does.
Watch out for
The headline figure is raw. Ahrefs states that the 23.1% is the observed change for the highly exposed group with no control adjustment. The control group’s CTR rose 2.3% over the same period, so read the two numbers side by side rather than quoting 23.1% as a clean AI Overviews-only effect.
The windows are not equal length. Twenty-eight days before against nine days after means the post-launch side carries far less data and no seasonal cycle.
A slope is not a forecast. Ahrefs notes that some heavily exposed sites are doing fine and some barely exposed ones are falling apart for reasons unrelated to AI.
Exposure is still climbing. The median AI Overview rate among the studied domains is 5.4%, and 29% are already above 10%. Ahrefs’ global tracking put the hit to position 1 CTR at 34.5% in spring 2025 and 58% by the end of that year.