Ray Reports 80% French Click Loss. Check Impressions

If you have been waiting for hard numbers from France, you now have two sets, and they are not measuring the same thing.

On October 19, 2026, SEO consultant Lily Ray posted on X that "The site I'm working on saw its average CTR in France drop from 1.63% to .53% and clicks drop by 80% after AI Overviews were launched there." That is one site and one metric. Le Monde's CEO, Louis Dreyfus, describes total audience: Search Engine Journal reports he told the trade outlet INfluencia that it has not declined abruptly since the launch.

I think the first number is the more useful one. If her click and CTR figures cover the same pages and period, impressions fell as well, and that is the first number French site owners should check.

Ray posted the figures at 12:51 UTC. She did not say what kind of site it is. In a reply, Ray said "That all happened to start on July 21." Le Monde reported that Google was launching AI Overviews in France on Wednesday, July 22.

The replies went straight to the missing piece. One asked what happened to impressions. Another reader, Dries de Gelder, suggested splitting the drop by intent: "Worth splitting that drop by intent. The losses usually pile up on how-to and definition queries, while branded and transactional terms barely move." That is his hypothesis, and nobody has tested it on her data. He added that for informational queries, being cited inside the Overview may be the only visibility left, which is a claim about citations that her figures do not address.

Le Monde reports a steadier audience

The other account is an interview that Search Engine Journal summarized on September 10. It is the paper's reporting of the interview, since I have not read the French original. Dreyfus said that, aside from normal seasonal changes, Le Monde's audience had not dropped abruptly since the launch.

He also addressed the press alliance APIG, which asked France's competition authority to act. APIG's filing cites an estimate from the regulator Arcom of a 33% to 38% traffic loss in European markets where AI Overviews were already live. Dreyfus said that figure refers to Google Search traffic, not total audience.

Search Engine Journal notes that Le Monde's apps made up 36% of group traffic in August, and that the interview gave no breakdown of its Google referrals. Dreyfus also said news content seems to have held up while service sectors such as health, food and automotive may have lost audience of up to 50%. Search Engine Journal says those figures come from his accounts of talks with publishers, not from published data.

The audience certifier ACPM told the outlet Minted that it saw no collapse in certified traffic in August, and called August too unusual a month to judge.

What the arithmetic says

Clicks are impressions times CTR. A fall from 1.63% to .53% cuts CTR by about two thirds. If clicks fell 80%, impressions fell about 38%. That holds only if both numbers cover the same pages and period, and the calculation is mine, not Ray's.

The two metrics answer different questions. CTR says how many of the people who saw a result clicked it. Impressions say how often the site showed up at all. A lower CTR can come from an AI Overview answering the question, but it can also come from rankings slipping or a changed results page. A drop in impressions points toward exposure, and Ray has not yet shown which queries lost it.

That is why I would not set Ray's number against Le Monde's. One consultant's site and one publisher's group audience are not like-for-like samples. What I take from them is the method. Split the French Search Console data by query intent, put impressions next to CTR, and work out whether the site lost exposure or lost clicks before blaming AI Overviews for either.