Google launched its AI Overviews and its conversational AI Mode in France on 22 July 2026, two months ahead of the 23 September deadline we detailed in our analysis of the French timetable. The shift goes beyond Google: 68% of Google searches in the United States ended without a single click to a website over the first four months of 2026, according to the SparkToro study published in June 2026 on Similarweb data. GSO, generative search optimisation, answers this shift. For a business leader comparing an SEO agency and a GEO agency in Luxembourg, the useful question is what changes in the work, and what has never moved.
The facts
- AI Overviews and AI Mode have been live in France since 22 July 2026, two years after their US launch: searches in French are moving into the mechanism already familiar in English, an answer composed by a model and displayed above the links.
- 68.01% of Google searches in the United States ended without any click to a website, cited or not, between January and April 2026, against 60.45% in 2024, according to the SparkToro study of 9 June 2026 on Similarweb data; the presence of an AI Overview alone cuts the click-through rate by close to 60%.
- Ranking well no longer guarantees being cited: in March 2026, only 38% of the pages cited by AI Overviews also appeared in the organic top 10, against around 76% in July 2025, according to Ahrefs (863,000 SERPs analysed).
What changes between SEO and GSO in an agency's work?
GSO invents no new foundations. Generative models rely on the signals Google has been reading for twenty years: a clean technical structure, authority built over time, content that answers a question people actually ask. A model first picks a source it recognises, then extracts the passage that answers the query; that recognition is built over years of consistent presence, quality backlinks, press citations, repeated mentions on the same subject, and no technical shortcut replaces it. I spent twenty years building content strategies at Vanksen before co-founding AIxH: a text that circles its subject for eight paragraphs before answering lost on Google yesterday, and today it loses on both fronts.
Four everyday tasks do change in nature. Format first: an SEO agency optimised a page for position one and the click; a GSO agency writes passages that can be extracted as they stand, three sentences that answer the question head-on. Structure next: schema.org markup and heading hierarchy become the way a model identifies who is speaking, about what, and with what legitimacy. Evidence too: a dated, sourced, quantified statistic carries more weight than a well-turned paragraph of opinion, and at times the work looks more like journalistic fact-checking than SEO copywriting. Wording, finally: headings that repeat the question the way people ask it, rather than a marketing turn of phrase.
Dependence on the click is falling, and measurement has to follow. A page can be cited in a generated answer without producing a single visit: organic traffic remains an indicator, but on its own it no longer tells the whole story. Tracking a brand's presence in AI answers, query by query and engine by engine, becomes a discipline in its own right, separate from classic rank tracking. The questions to ask a provider change with it: those of 2023, target keywords, promised traffic, monthly backlinks, remain valid, but they are no longer enough to evaluate this work.
AIxH's view
The foundations do not change; the format of the evidence does. An agency that has not made this shift in its own method will not be able to guide you through it. That is the point of our dual positioning as an SEO agency in Luxembourg and a GEO agency in Luxembourg: the same foundations, two delivery formats, and measurement that tracks AI citations as well as positions. Before signing, our guide Choosing an SEO or GEO agency in Luxembourg details the criteria to check, and our 10 golden rules of GEO in 2026 list what works, figures in hand, and what belongs to technical folklore.