Ahrefs tracked 963 French domains before and after AI Overviews launched, and the most exposed lost 23.1 percent of their clicks

Ahrefs published a data study on the launch of Google's AI Overviews in France on 22 July 2026, using Google Search Console data from 963 domains that its readers had connected to the tool. It compared daily clicks, impressions and click-through rate for the 28 days before the launch against the 9 days after, and measured how much of the effect was concentrated in the domains that AI Overviews touched most often.

What the numbers say

Ahrefs reports that the median domain in the panel lost 5.7 percent of its clicks in the post-launch window, and 8.8 percent of its daily clicks on the days AI Overviews was showing. Nearly half the panel, 48 percent, lost more than 10 percent of daily clicks, and 19 percent lost more than 30 percent. When Ahrefs restricted the panel to the domains where AI Overviews appeared most often, the click-through rate on those domains fell 23.1 percent across the 9 days.

The most affected sector was health. Ahrefs measured 44.1 percent of medical queries triggering an AI Overview and a 20.4 percent click-through rate decline on health domains in the panel. That was the largest sector-level drop the study recorded.

The method, and its limits

The panel is 963 domains from an initial 1,000, drawn as the sites generating the most clicks in France and matched to complete pre and post daily data in Search Console. Ahrefs measured the AI Overview rate per domain as the share of impressions returning a query that triggered one. Domains with incomplete history were excluded.

Two limits are worth naming, because they change what the number can be used for. The post-launch window is 9 days. That is enough to see a shift, and short enough that user behaviour has not yet adjusted around it, so the medium-term number is likely to move. And the panel is Ahrefs users, which is a slice of publisher and commerce sites rather than a representative sample of the French web. A blog on WordPress with no analytics is not in it.

What a team reads from this

If a site is in a sector where a query is likely to be answered directly, the pre-launch click number is no longer the number to plan against. The health figure of 20 percent lower clicks is the largest measured; the panel median of 5.7 percent is the softer floor. The Ahrefs data is Search Console data, so a team can produce the same view of its own site by picking the same before and after windows and reading the AI Overview presence off the search appearance filter Google exposes.

Source

Ahrefs data study, AI Overviews cut CTR by 23.1 percent in France by Juliette Bègue.