Google's AI Overviews are eating your clicks: what's left to win back

Search "combien coûte un site web" from Montreal today, in French, and the first thing you read is not a link: it's a paragraph written by Google, followed by a few sources. That's an AI Overview. For a business that has invested in SEO, the question is blunt: if Google answers instead of my site, what is my blog for? We ask it about ourselves too, since we sell websites and AI agents on subscription and publish an article a day.

This article is about Google's own results page. That's a different problem from getting cited by ChatGPT, where the subject was separate assistants your clients choose to open. Here it's your usual SERP, the one you spent two years earning positions on, changing shape under your feet.

The conclusion up front: there is a real loss of clicks on part of your queries, it's measurable, it doesn't touch everything, and the right response is neither panic nor paying for "AI Overview optimization", which doesn't exist.

The short answer, for the busy

AI Overviews are the AI-generated answers Google places above the results, with a few links to the sites that support them. They cut clicks on informational queries: according to a Pew Research Center study published on July 22, 2025, covering 68,879 real searches, users clicked a search result on 8% of visits when an overview was present, against 15% when it wasn't, and only 1% clicked a link inside the overview itself. Three consequences for a small business. Your Search Console impressions can rise while your clicks fall, because a link seen inside an overview counts as an impression. Your local, transactional and brand queries stay largely quiet. And there is no special optimization to buy: Google states that an eligible page is simply a page that is indexed, eligible to show with a snippet, and genuinely useful.

What just changed for a French-language search

Until recently this was a theoretical file for a French-speaking business in Quebec. Google launched AI Overviews in Canada on October 28, 2024, but its own announcement listed the supported languages (English, Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish) and said plainly: "French is not currently supported."

That has changed. Google expanded overviews to more than 200 countries and more than 40 languages in May 2025, then launched Aperçus IA and Mode IA in France on July 22, 2026. And our own live checks on August 17, 2026, run from Quebec in French, show an AI Overview on "combien coûte un site web", "loi 25 résumé", "seo local" and "refonte site web". Four ordinary small-business queries. As far as we can find, Google has published no announcement naming French for Canada, so treat the exact date as uncertain. What matters is that the format is on your queries now.

The honest number on clicks

The Pew Research Center study is still the cleanest measurement available, because it observes real behaviour rather than survey answers: 900 U.S. adults agreed to share their browsing, which produced 68,879 Google searches in March 2025, 12,593 of them accompanied by an overview.

Going from 15% to 8% is close to half the clicks gone. And since the link inside the overview is clicked on just 1% of visits, being cited in the answer does not make up for the position lost below it. One more signal in the same direction: 26% of visits end the browsing session entirely when an overview is shown, against 16% without one.

Google, for its part, says total organic click volume to websites has been relatively stable year over year, and that average click quality has gone up (fewer fast bounces back to the results). Both claims can hold at once: Google is describing the aggregate of the entire web, the study is describing behaviour per search. Neither describes your site, which is why the rest of this article is about your own numbers.

Why your impressions rise while your clicks fall

Here is the exact mechanism, and it explains most of the strange reports people show us.

In Search Console, AI Overviews are not a separate world: they're folded into ordinary search traffic, under the "Web" search type. A click on an external link inside an overview counts as a normal click. An impression is counted as soon as the link is visible, meaning as soon as the user scrolled or expanded the overview. And the overview occupies a single position in the results: every link it contains inherits that same position.

In practice: the day you get cited inside an overview, your average position improves, your impressions climb, and your click-through rate collapses. The chart looks like a penalty when the opposite happened, you became more visible.

Since June 3, 2026, Google offers a dedicated performance report for generative AI features (AI Overviews, AI Mode, Discover), with impressions by page, country, device and date. It's rolling out gradually, and it only reports impressions, not clicks. It's still the first tool that separates the two worlds instead of guessing. Until you have it, read query by query, not in site averages.

Exposed queries and quiet queries

Not all your pages carry the same risk, and the Pew data gives a simple rule. An overview appeared on 8% of one- or two-word searches, but on 53% of searches of ten words or more. Questions starting with who, what, when or why triggered one 60% of the time.

Exposed: definitions, explanations, how-tos, general comparisons. In other words, the core of a classic business blog.

Quiet: your brand name, local queries like "plumber Longueuil" (where the map pack and your Google Business Profile do the work), and short transactional queries where the person wants to buy, book, or get a quote. A machine can summarize what a heat pump is. It can't sell you the installation.

The consequence for choosing your keywords is direct: if 90% of your editorial plan is general questions, you're building on the most exposed ground. Keep some for credibility, but put the effort where a click is worth a client.

What gets a small site cited, and what is a waste

Good news: there's no secret door, so there's nothing to buy. Google's documentation is explicit. To be eligible as a supporting link in an overview, a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown with a snippet. "There are no additional technical requirements."

Google also publishes a list of things that don't help, which is money saved. The llms.txt file is not used by Google Search. "Chunking" your content for AI is not required. Structured data is not required for generative features, though it stays worthwhile for rich results. Rewriting your text "for AI" does nothing, and chasing inauthentic mentions across the web does nothing either.

What Google says it does value is consistent with everything else: non-commodity content, a first-hand point of view, real experience rather than a summary of what already exists. Its own counter-example sets "7 Tips for First-Time Homebuyers" against "Why We Waived the Inspection & Saved Money". The Pew data points the same way: Wikipedia, YouTube and Reddit alone make up 15% of cited sources, and government sites appear three times more often in overviews than in standard results. Authority or lived experience: that's where overviews lean.

So why do we keep the "short answer" block at the top of every article? Not because Google wants pre-chopped chunks, it says the opposite. Because a hurried reader finds the answer in ten seconds, and because other answer engines do quote a self-contained passage. It's an editorial choice, not a trick.

The "exclude" switch, and why we leave it alone

Google added a setting in Search Console (Settings, then "Search generative AI") that lets you include or exclude your site from generative AI features. Include is the default. Excluding removes your links and content from those features, and Google states you will then receive neither traffic nor impressions from them. The setting is not used as a ranking signal elsewhere in Search, and it too is rolling out gradually.

Our position: leave it alone. Opting out doesn't bring the click back, since the overview will still appear, built from your competitors' content. It only removes your chance of being the source cited.

What we measure now

Three habits to change, all more useful than panic.

Stop judging an article by clicks alone: track the queries that produce quote requests, and click-through rate per query rather than the site average.

Write for the person who still clicks. They click because the summary wasn't enough: they want a real price, a lived case, a local number, someone to talk to. That's what an automatic summary can't manufacture, and it's also what Google says it rewards.

And own the ground the overview doesn't take: your local profile, your service pages, your brand, the pages where people buy.

That's the kind of diagnosis we run in an audit: which queries still bring you clicks, which ones now sit behind an overview, and where to move the effort. 30 minutes, no commitment.

→ Request an audit