Clicks from Google to one French website fell from about 750 a day to about 400 on July 22, 2026, the day Google switched on AI Overviews in France, according to an analysis of Google's own webmaster data that search consultant Glenn Gabe published today. Two of the five sites in the analysis, however, kept their traffic.

In Short

Glenn Gabe published charts from five unnamed websites showing what happened to their French Google traffic after AI Overviews arrived there on July 22, 2026. Three of the sites saw clicks or click-through rate fall by roughly 45% to 70% almost overnight, by PPC Land's calculation, while two saw little change, which matters to any business that depends on organic search in France. The charts show a sharp break on the launch date, but they come from one consultant's selection of sites with no control group, so they cannot on their own separate AI Overviews from the other AI search features launched the same day, seasonal patterns or other Google changes.

A launch date clean enough to measure

France was a holdout for more than a year. When Google brought AI Overviews to nine other European countries on March 26, 2025, France was not on the list, and the gap lasted until Google switched the feature on in France on July 22, 2026, after a Search Help thread in May drew 68 users reporting that it was missing.

The July launch was not a single feature. AI Mode, Google's conversational search surface, Search Live and a new search box arrived on the same day as the summaries that sit above the organic results. Gabe's post embeds an X post from Google's Rajan Patel dated July 22, 2026: "We're rolling out our advanced AI Search experiences to France!" The post lists "AI Overviews, AI Mode, Search Live and the new intelligent Search box" as "launching starting today."

What made the date useful to analysts was a second change on Google's side. Google added generative AI reports to Search Console on June 3, 2026, first for a subset of websites, and then extended them to every site as of August 31, 2026. The reports count impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode and can be broken down by country. They do not show clicks, click-through rate or queries.

"Since there was a distinct date for the rollout, and we now have Generative AI reporting in GSC, it's the clearest date we have for seeing the change roll out," Gabe wrote. Later in the post he added: "From what I can remember, we've never had such a clear date of AIOs rolling out in a specific country."

How the charts were pulled

The method is simple, and Gabe's post describes it in a few lines. He filtered the Performance report by France and opened the Generative AI report to confirm the jump in AI impressions. In a second window, with the France filter still active, he opened the standard Performance report for web search and compared clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position before and after July 22. The screenshots show six-month views with the search type set to "Web (text)", one of two options since Google split the Web search type into text-based and multimodal results on September 24, 2026.

The sites are not named. Two are described as YMYL sites, the category Google applies to health, finance and safety topics. The click figures are rounded daily averages read off the charts rather than exported tables, and Gabe does not say how many sites he examined in total, only that certain patterns appeared at "every site I analyzed" with heavy impact.

Gabe runs G-Squared Interactive, a consultancy that sells SEO and AI search services, including recovery work for companies that lose organic traffic. His post also positions itself against earlier work: "ahrefs provided some data back in September based on sites they are monitoring, but there weren't examples from GSC." Ahrefs' study did draw on aggregated Search Console data, but it published panel-wide figures rather than charts from individual properties.

Case one: clicks nearly halved

The first site is the starkest of the five. "I don't know if there is a clearer example of the impact of AIOs on a site than this one," Gabe wrote.

Its generative AI impressions in France were close to zero until July 22, then jumped to roughly 600 to 800 a day and kept climbing, reaching about 2,400 a day by early November, according to the chart. Over the six-month view, the report counts 130,000 generative AI impressions.

Clicks moved in the opposite direction. "And right when AIOs roll out, clicks drop from about 750 per day to about 400 per day. So almost cut in half," Gabe wrote. That is a decline of roughly 47%, by PPC Land's calculation. Total impressions did not fall. "Impressions remain stable, so the site is still ranking, but just saw a big hit to clicks," according to the post. Click-through rate followed: "2% CTR drops to 1.1% overnight," a relative fall of 45% by PPC Land's calculation.

For the full window, from May 5 to early November 2026, the screenshot shows 93,600 clicks, 6.39 million impressions, an average click-through rate of 1.5% and an average position of 9.2.

The charts also contain details the post does not discuss. Click-through rate was already drifting down before the launch, from about 2.5% in mid-May to about 2% by mid-July, while daily impressions roughly doubled from around 22,000 to around 40,000 and clicks rose. The break on July 22 is much sharper than that drift, but the drift means not all of the change between May and November belongs to AI Overviews. The generative AI chart also shows a brief collapse in early October, to roughly 400 to 500 impressions a day, before a recovery to the previous level.

Case two: from 80 clicks a day to 25

The second site is smaller and in a YMYL category. Its generative AI impressions rose from almost nothing to roughly 500 to 900 a day on July 22, totalling 73,600 over the six-month view.

"And right when that happens, clicks dropped from about 80 per day in France to about 25 per day," Gabe wrote. By PPC Land's calculation that is a loss of about 69% of daily clicks. A second, smaller drop followed around August 10.

This case is also the least tidy. "Impressions dropped pretty heavily but about a week prior to the rollout," according to Gabe, and the same impressions drop appeared in other countries, where traffic actually rose in some cases. He called it "a weird anomaly for that site in particular." Because impressions and clicks fell together, click-through rate stayed stable, so the main evidence for an AI Overviews effect here is the timing of the click drop alongside the surge in generative AI impressions.

Case three: the double drop

The third site, another YMYL property, shows a pattern Gabe says he saw across several sites in that category: a double drop. Clicks fell on July 22 and then again around August 13.

"I believe this was Google rolling out AIOs for additional query types after the initial rollout testing," Gabe wrote. He offered a possible reason: "maybe Google was more cautious for sensitive YMYL queries when they first rolled out on 7/22/26 and then decided to roll out AIOs for more queries a few weeks later." Google has not said publicly that it widened AI Overviews coverage in France in August, so the explanation remains his hypothesis.

The click-through rate figures are the steepest in the post. "A CTR of 1.2% drops to .4% after the rollout. A huge drop," Gabe wrote. That is a relative decline of about 67%, by PPC Land's calculation. Impressions held steady through the rollout and then fell in early September.

Cases four and five: little or no change

Not every site lost traffic, and Gabe treats this as one of the central findings. "Although some believe all sites are dropping in clicks, that's not the case," he wrote.

The fourth site shows the same surge in generative AI impressions from July 22, yet its clicks stayed strong. It had a dip during the summer that began before AI Overviews arrived, and clicks and impressions returned by early September. Gabe's verdict: "this site saw no drop in clicks really based on AIOs rolling out."

The fifth site was also stable. Its click-through rate dipped earlier in July, before the launch, and then returned to its usual level, while clicks and impressions held through the rollout.

Why would two sites with the same surge in AI impressions keep their clicks? The post leaves that open. Gabe does not describe their sectors, query mix or the share of branded searches, though he notes that "branded and navigational queries will yield higher CTRs than non-branded queries." Google has separately started moving AI Overviews for brand searches out of the main results column, although the examples reported so far are from the United States.

The position wobble

One pattern appeared at every heavily affected site Gabe analyzed and at almost every site overall: the average position line, fairly flat before July 22, turned jagged on the launch date. He calls this the wobble.

His explanation rests on how Search Console counts AI Overviews citations. "Since a citation in AIOs only receives an impression when it's visible, the wobbling could be the result of AIOs that are collapsed by default," he wrote. If a page is cited in a collapsed AI Overview and also ranks in the organic results, only the organic listing registers when the summary is not expanded, at a lower position. When searchers expand the summary, the citation registers instead.

Two rules documented earlier support that reading. Google's documentation, reported in June 2025, groups all links in an AI Overview at position one. And Google's John Mueller said in January 2026 that a URL appearing in both an AI Overview and the blue links on the same page counts as one impression. If the counted position depends on whether the citation was visible, the daily average will move with the share of summaries that searchers open. Google has not confirmed that this is what happened in the French data.

Expansion behaviour is also changing. Search Engine Roundtable reported on August 28, 2026 that some AI Overviews now load in full by default with the follow-up question box already open, which pushes organic results further down the page; Google told the publication that some summaries may expand dynamically for topics where its systems judge that most useful. Gabe flags the change, noting that Google rolled it out in late August and that queries with expanded summaries may show more impact. On the fifth site, where the wobble was milder, he suggested that "more people expanding the AIOs" or summaries expanding by default for more queries could explain the difference. Earlier research by Kevin Indig and Eric van Buskirk found that 88% of users clicked "show more" on AI Overviews, though median scroll depth was only 30%, and since January 2026 follow-up questions in AI Overviews can move users straight into AI Mode.

What the charts cannot show

The analysis is a set of case studies, not a controlled measurement, and several limits follow from that.

The sample is small and selected. Five sites appear in the post, chosen from an unstated total, with only two sectors described. Showing the clearest cases is reasonable for illustrating a pattern, but it says little about how common the heavy losses are.

There is no control series. The charts compare French traffic before and after one date, without a parallel line for the same sites in a country where nothing changed on July 22, or a year-on-year comparison. Gabe himself warns that seasonal traffic can mislead and that a site with usual autumn growth could look flat while actually losing traffic, and he recommends checking the previous year's figures. The launch also fell in late July, and case four's own chart shows a summer dip that started before AI Overviews arrived.

The launch was a bundle. AI Mode, Search Live and a new search box arrived on the same day as AI Overviews, and the generative AI report combines AI Overviews and AI Mode impressions. AI Mode clicks and impressions also count in the main Search Console totals. Some of the lost clicks may reflect searchers moving into AI Mode rather than reading a summary, and the charts cannot separate the two.

Other Google changes overlap the second drops. PPC Land recorded ranking movement on August 12 and 13, 2026, and a Search Console performance-report incident around August 12, days before Google began its August 2026 spam update on August 18. The second drops at cases two and three, around August 10 and August 13, fall in or near that window. That does not rule out Gabe's explanation, but it is a competing one.

And the reports cannot connect clicks to queries. Because the generative AI report has no click or query data, there is no way inside Search Console to confirm that the queries losing clicks are the queries showing AI Overviews. The attribution rests on timing, which is strong evidence here but not proof.

How the numbers compare

The steepest drops in Gabe's post are far larger than the averages in the main panel study of the French launch. Ahrefs published an analysis of the French rollout on September 16, 2026, 56 days after the launch by PPC Land's count. According to Ahrefs, it used aggregated Search Console data from 963 of the top 1,000 domains by clicks in France and compared the 28 days before July 22 with the nine days after.

According to Ahrefs, domains where more than 20% of queries triggered an AI Overview, which it called highly exposed, saw click-through rate fall 23.1%, with the median moving from 2.29% to 1.76%. It found that 82.2% of those domains lost click-through rate, while a control group, where fewer than 2% of queries triggered an AI Overview, saw click-through rate rise 2.3%. Health sites lost 20.4% of click-through rate, and .fr domains lost a median 12.3% of clicks, against 8.8% for the whole panel, according to Ahrefs.

The two sets of findings point the same way. Ahrefs' 82.2% figure implies that nearly one in five highly exposed domains did not lose click-through rate in the first nine days, which fits Gabe's stable sites. Gabe's cases cover more than three months of data, against nine days for Ahrefs, but only five properties.

Earlier studies outside France reached similar conclusions with different methods. Ahrefs reported in February 2026 that AI Overviews were associated with a 58% lower click-through rate for top-ranking pages, comparing December 2025 with December 2023, up from the 34.5% it measured in April 2025. Seer Interactive found in November 2025 that organic click-through rate on queries with AI Overviews fell 61% and paid click-through rate 68% across 3,119 informational queries. A randomized field experiment with 1,065 users found outbound organic clicks fell 39.8% when an AI Overview appeared, with zero-click searches up 34.5%. Google has argued the other side, saying in July 2025 that clicks from pages with AI Overviews are of higher quality, with visitors more likely to spend time on the site.

Why French publishers and advertisers are watching

The French data lands in an active dispute. On August 11, 2026, the Alliance de la presse d'information générale asked France's competition authority to enforce Google's 2022 commitments, citing an Arcom estimate of 33% to 38% traffic losses from AI summaries in European markets where they operate. On October 26, seven publisher groups asked the EU and Canada to act on AI search summaries, and on October 29, five French publisher groups complained to the European Commission about AI Overviews and AI Mode. That complaint contained no traffic figures. Site-level charts such as Gabe's are the kind of evidence those filings did not include, although five anonymous sites are a thin basis for a regulatory case.

Site owners also had a new choice just before the launch. On July 20, 2026, two days before AI Overviews reached France, Google gave site owners a Search Console setting to exclude their sites from AI Overviews and AI Mode, applied at domain level and without changing conventional rankings. All five sites in Gabe's analysis show rising generative AI impressions after July 22, so none of them had opted out.

For advertisers, the analysis covers organic clicks only, and so does the Ahrefs study of the French launch. Neither measures paid search in France. The Seer study's 68% decline in paid click-through rate on queries with AI Overviews came from its own client accounts, and no comparable figure for French paid search has been published.

Gabe ends with a list of checks for site owners. It covers concentrating on July 22 as the comparison date, using the France filter, which carries across reports, and inspecting the live SERP for queries that lost clicks to see whether summaries were collapsed or expanded. The list also covers identifying queries where AI Overviews have not yet appeared, comparing with the previous year's traffic, and separating branded from non-branded queries. "Some sites were heavily impacted, but some were not impacted much," Gabe wrote. Which of those outcomes is more common across French sites is something five charts cannot settle.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Glenn Gabe, an SEO and AI search consultant who runs G-Squared Interactive, published the analysis. It covers five unnamed websites, two of them in YMYL categories, and Google, whose AI Overviews launch in France is the event measured.

What: Search Console data from the five sites showed clicks falling from about 750 to about 400 a day at one site and from about 80 to about 25 at another, and click-through rate falling from 1.2% to 0.4% at a third, while two sites kept stable traffic. Average position became erratic at almost every site. The analysis has no control group and cannot separate AI Overviews from AI Mode, which launched the same day.

When: The analysis was published today. It examines the period around July 22, 2026, when Google launched AI Overviews, AI Mode, Search Live and a new search box in France, with data running to early November.

Where: France, using the country filter in Google Search Console's Performance and generative AI reports.

Why: France had a single, clear launch date and Search Console now reports generative AI impressions by country, which gives the cleanest before-and-after view of AI Overviews yet available to site owners. The results bear on French publishers' complaints to national and EU authorities, and on how marketers attribute traffic changes since July 22.