Since July 22, 2026, Google has been showing answers written by its AI above the search results in France. You ask a question, a box answers it in a few lines, with links to its sources. Part of those searches stop there, without a single click to the sites listed below.

Those boxes are called AI Overviews. Here is what changed, and how to check what Google already answers in your market.

1. What changed on July 22, 2026.

An AI Overview is an answer written by Gemini, Google’s AI model, from pages in its index, and displayed above the classic results.

The rest of the world got them before us: Germany, Italy, Spain and Belgium in March 2025, more than 200 countries since May 2025. France stayed out for a legal reason: neighbouring rights have protected French press publishers since 2019, and the agreements signed with Google covered the display of snippets, not the rewriting of content by an AI. The French competition authority had in fact fined Google 250 million euros in March 2024 on those grounds.

The rollout is gradual: depending on your account, your device and your queries, you may not have run into a box yet. Your clients will run into more and more of them.

2. Where those answers come from.

When a search triggers an AI Overview, here is what happens while the page loads:

1. Google analyses the intent behind the query.
2. It pulls from its index the pages that answer it best.
3. Gemini writes a summary from those pages.
4. The answer appears, with links to the sources it kept.

The point that matters in this mechanism: the sources of an AI Overview are pages Google already ranks well. Gemini does not go hunting for your site in a corner of the web, it draws from the results Google would have shown anyway. With no well-ranked page, nothing to cite: SEO stays the door in. It is the same live search mechanism ChatGPT and Perplexity use when a question calls for fresh data.

3. Clicks drop, except for the cited sites.

The box sits above the first result, and it answers. On the queries concerned, part of the users have no reason left to scroll down: the first position waits under the answer.

The click does not vanish for all that. When the answer is not enough, the user opens the sources cited in the box: the click goes to them first, while the sites that were not cited hope for a scroll.

Ranking first is no longer enough, you have to be in the answer. A citation puts your name in front of the prospect at the exact moment they compare.

4. What it changes for your site, and what it does not.

Nothing in that left column is new. The fundamentals of GEO (being recommended by ChatGPT, Perplexity and now Google’s AI answers) and the rules of a mention that counts apply to AI Overviews identically: Google draws from the same web, with the same filters.

If your site is recent and technically clean, you are probably ready already. On our projects, that groundwork is part of the scope of every site: speed, tags, schema.org, crawlers allowed. If your site is a few years old and has never been audited, now is the time to check.

5. Check what Google answers in your market.

Google Search Console does not separate clicks coming from an AI Overview from classic ones. Your usual stats will therefore tell you neither whether those boxes cite you, nor whether they cite your competitors.

The check is done by hand, one hour a month:

1. List ten or so queries your clients would type. Not your name: their need. “restaurant booking software”, “web agency Nantes”, “how to choose an accountant”.
2. Type them into Google, in a private window. For each one, note whether an AI Overview appears, and who is cited in it.
3. Redo the check every month. The French rollout advances in waves and the answers move: a query that stays silent today can trigger a box next month.

That check tells you where to act. If your competitors are cited and you are not, open the cited pages: the formats Gemini keeps are visible to the naked eye, often guides, comparisons, pages full of numbers. Paid tools automate that tracking across all AI platforms; useful the day the manual check no longer scales, not required to start.

A launch, a fundraise or a trade show in the coming months? Now is the right time to put up a site Google can cite. Book a call, thirty minutes to scope your project.