Google AI Overviews in France, Digi Mart USA News: Three months after Google AI Overviews arrived in France, Converteo and Qwairy analyzed the sources behind the AI-generated summaries. Commercial websites supplied 57.2% of citations, compared with 9.9% for media outlets.
The study, as reported by Visionary Marketing, is based on the publisher’s account of the research.
According to the article, 90% of answers change with each session, and high-authority sites are cited 2.7 times more often than others. The study is authored by Emmanuel Chomier, Laurent Rabin, Florent Thuilliez and Maxime Vivos, and relies on 735 prompts per country spread across seven sectors, run daily from August 13 to 23, 2026.
Google AI Overviews launched in France on July 22.
The article notes that AI summaries reduce the click-through rate to the first organic result by 58%, citing Ahrefs data from December 2025 on desktop searches. It also reports that 55.4% of queries involve comparison, rising to 68.4% in services and 67.8% in telecoms, banking and insurance.
The author says the shift marks the end of exploratory clicks, though users who do click are described as highly qualified, spending 11.8 minutes on a site versus 5.6 and viewing 12 pages versus 6.5, figures drawn from a Similarweb study of ChatGPT recommendations rather than Google results.
The author states that these engagement figures could not be independently verified. Alphabet shares fell as much as 12% on October 29, the day after its quarterly results, wiping out roughly $480 billion in market value according to Forbes, which the article describes as the second-largest one-day drop in the company’s history.
The article also reports that France began AI Overviews more than two years after the United States, in July 2026 compared with May 2024, due to disputes over neighboring rights. It adds that for the same prompt, at least one cited source or the order of sources changes in 92.7% of cases in France and 96.7% in the United States.
Media outlets account for 12.6% of citations in the United States, while commercial sites account for 49.7%. The author cautions that 37.5% of study prompts mention a brand, which mechanically favors brand websites.
For B2B marketers, the article recommends account-based marketing and personalized content aimed at target accounts. For B2C brands, it recommends strengthening loyalty, social media communities, newsletters and owned mailing lists.
The author warns that if content creation becomes less profitable, more material could move behind paywalls. The article also notes limits of the study: the authors work in consulting and GEO, the sample covers only 11 days, and the reported link between domain authority and citations is a correlation rather than proven causation.
