Since Wednesday 22 July, Google has been activating AI Overviews and AI Mode in France, two features already live in 200 countries since late May. Publishers and media fear an erosion of organic traffic, a phenomenon already measured in markets where the feature has been active for several months.
The facts
- In Germany, Sistrix measures a 25% to 30% drop in clicks to the first organic position, and an average 6.6% decline in overall traffic from Google.
- According to Chartbeat, cited by the Reuters Institute, visits from Google fell by 33% between November 2024 and November 2025 across a sample of 2,500 news sites.
- Google claims 2.5 billion monthly users for AI Overviews and 1 billion for AI Mode, against 1 billion weekly users for ChatGPT.
What does this rollout change for business visibility?
The search result stops being a list of links: it becomes a written answer, which cites sources or leaves them out depending on how easily a model can extract and rephrase them. Luxembourg does not yet have a localised version of the feature, but exposure is already real: part of the cross-border user base goes through google.fr, and extension to other European markets has historically followed a tight schedule after each step.
A site that ranks well in the blue links can remain invisible in an AI-generated summary, and vice versa. The discipline that answers this shift has a name, GEO, generative engine optimisation: structuring content so that it is understood, cited and rephrased by generative engines, on top of classic ranking. Companies that wait for confirmation of the phenomenon on their own traffic lose the first-mover advantage in AI answers, which is built over time.
AIxH's view
This is the ground covered by our SEO & GSO service: auditing how citable a piece of content is in generative answers, beyond its ranking in classic results. As a GEO agency in Luxembourg, we support cross-border companies exposed to this shift before a localised version of the feature arrives. If you want to measure your site's exposure to these new formats, a first conversation is enough to identify the starting point.