By James Calloway

Highly exposed French domains lost 23.1% of their click-through rate in the nine days after AI Overviews (Google's AI-generated answer boxes above traditional search results) rolled out in the country on July 22, 2026, according to a new Ahrefs study tracking 963 sites through Google Search Console (GSC, Google's free webmaster dashboard that logs impressions and clicks for individual pages).

That's six times the 3.4% CTR drop across the full panel. And 82.2% of the most exposed sites lost CTR — escaping the hit has become the exception at that exposure level.

The findings arrive with a clarity most markets never get. Ahrefs data scientist Xibeijia Guan pulled 28 days of pre-launch data and 9 days of post-launch data for 963 domains showing in French SERPs (search engine results pages).

"France had a launch date, and we were already tracking," the study's authors wrote. "For once, we got to watch the before and after without having to guess."

What did the control group look like?

Over the same window, domains with little AI Overview exposure saw CTR climb 2.3%. Highly exposed sites didn't just fall 23.1% — they also missed that small lift everyone else enjoyed. Once you net out the control, the real effect of AI Overviews lands at -24.8%.

Is exposure actually the variable?

Yes, and the relationship is close to linear. Ahrefs plotted each domain's CTR change against its AI Overview rate and got -0.9. Translation: every extra point of AI Overview exposure costs roughly one point of CTR. A 15% AI Overview rate implies a CTR hit near 15%.

The study's authors flag their own caveat. "Some heavily exposed sites are doing fine, and some barely exposed ones are falling apart for reasons that have nothing to do with AI," they wrote. "Your AI Overview rate is a risk factor, not a verdict."

How bad is the distribution?

Brutal. Across the 963-site panel:

• Median CTR change: -5.7%
• Median click change: -8.8%
• 48% of sites lost more than 10% of daily clicks
• 19% lost more than 30%
• 5% lost more than 50%

The .fr domains — French-registered sites — lost 12.3% of clicks at the median, against 8.8% for the full panel. French publishers took more damage than international competitors chasing the same queries.

Which vertical took the worst hit?

Health. The vertical posted a 22.2% AI Overview rate, the highest of any sector in the panel, and a 20.4% CTR drop. That tracks with earlier Ahrefs research showing 44.1% of medical queries trigger an AI Overview.

"Health queries are informational, they have short answers, and there's no transaction waiting at the end," the study notes. "That's exactly what an AI Overview absorbs best: the answer fits inside the box, and the user leaves with what they came for."

Did rankings actually fall?

No. Impressions held steady across the panel, sometimes climbing. The most extreme case in the French data: +183% impressions paired with -1.9% clicks, slashing CTR by more than three-quarters. Pages still rank. Users just stop clicking.

What does this line up with?

The French numbers track the global pattern Ahrefs first mapped in late 2025, when position-1 CTR impact from AI Overviews moved from -34.5% in spring 2025 to -58% by year-end. They also line up with outside measurements: Seer Interactive has reported organic CTR declines of 49.4% to 65.2%, Kevin Indig has measured drops above 50%, and Authoritas has published a 47.5% figure. Nobody is measuring the opposite.

What's the actionable read?

Three takeaways from the study:

1. Risk is measurable in advance — Ahrefs' SERP Features filter (a tool flag inside Site Explorer, the platform's site-audit product) returns each domain's share of queries that trigger an AI Overview.
2. Stop steering by impressions. They didn't drop. CTR is what moved.
3. The order of magnitude holds across independent studies.

Ahrefs plans to re-run the French panel over a longer window. The current median AI Overview rate sits at 5.4% across the 963 sites, and 29% of them already exceed 10%. Those numbers have climbed in every market since 2024, and France has now joined the trend.