AI answers cut clicks at some sites, but not all
A country wide launch gave SEOs a clean before and after, and the results split down the middle.
AI Overviews, the AI written answer that sits at the top of Google results, rolled out in France on July 22, 2026. That gave a clean before and after to measure. Glenn Gabe pulled Search Console data for a set of sites and published five cases. Three sites lost clicks. Two stayed stable.
He calls it the clearest evidence yet of how AI Overviews hit clicks and click through rate, which is the share of people who see your listing and click it. The takeaway is not that AI answers always cost you traffic. It is that the damage is uneven, and the only way to know which group you are in is to look at your own numbers.
What to do today
Gabe says site owners should dig into their own data, and he put a list of bullets at the end of his post for exactly that. Open Search Console, set the date range to cover the weeks before and after a known AI rollout in your market, and compare clicks and impressions for your top queries. If clicks fell while impressions held, people are seeing you and not clicking.
Being cited still matters
The other half of this picture comes from Cyrus SEO, who ran the opposite experiment and opted his site out of being cited in Google's AI answers. The clicks that came directly from AI citations were tiny, around a 1% click through rate. But opting out touched more than 20% of his traffic, because being cited was also lifting his normal organic clicks. We covered that test earlier.
So the two findings sit together. AI Overviews can take clicks from some sites and leave others alone. And the links inside those AI answers appear to be worth more than their own click numbers suggest, which is an argument against blocking yourself from them out of frustration.
Nobody has published a rule that explains why three sites dropped and two did not. Gabe did not say what separated them, and until someone does, the honest answer is that it varies by site and by query.
For a small business, the practical move is simple. Do not opt out of AI citations on a hunch. Spend ten minutes in Search Console comparing this quarter to last on your money queries, and if clicks are down while impressions are flat, work on the pages behind those queries rather than on the AI answer you cannot control.
Turns out Google AI citations are far more important than we thought
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