News sites fell in France after AI answers arrived
Shopping and property sites mostly held up, so the pattern is not the same for every kind of business.
Google switched on AI Overviews and AI Mode in France on July 22, 2026. Those are the AI-written answers that sit at the top of the results page, above the normal blue links. France has now had its first full month with them, and someone has gone looking at what happened to traffic.
Aleyda Solis compared Similarweb estimates for August against July. Similarweb is a tool that guesses how much traffic other websites get, so the numbers are estimates and not readings from anyone's own analytics.
News sites all went down
All 10 of the leading French news and media sites lost search traffic. The drops ran from 11.3% at the smallest to 29.6% at the largest. Le Monde was down 29.6%, Le Parisien down 26.6% and Le Figaro down 23.4%. Solis notes these sites tend to have more AI Overviews showing on the searches they compete for.
Shops and property sites mostly went up
The other two groups she checked look nothing like that. In ecommerce and shopping, 6 of the 10 sites grew. Temu was up 21.9%, Fnac up 4.2% and Leboncoin up 2.9%, while Amazon slipped slightly at 1.2% down. In real estate, 7 of the 10 grew, including PAP up 4.6% and SeLoger up 1.3%. Bienici was down 3.4%.
What this does and does not show
Solis is careful about what the numbers prove, and so should you be. This is one month of estimated data. July already contained part of the rollout, so it is not a clean before-and-after comparison. She also lists other things that could be moving the numbers, including seasonality, the news cycle, and changes in search demand and rankings.
Still, every single news site in the group went down, and by a lot. That consistency is the part worth watching.
What to do
If you run a shop or a service business, nothing here says your traffic is about to fall off a cliff. The sites that sell things mostly grew. The pattern here points at pages whose job is to tell people a fact, because an AI answer can repeat a fact without sending the click on.
So look at your own pages and ask which ones only state something a machine could summarise in two lines. Those are the ones most exposed. Pages that help someone choose, book, buy or compare with real detail are a different thing, and the French numbers give no reason to panic about them. Solis says she will dig further, so there should be more to go on soon.
Does this prove that AIOs / AI Mode caused the news publishers’ declines? No. But the consistency and scale of those declines deserve attention.