In short
- Across 599 French e-commerce queries, the AI Overview appears on 70% of informational queries, 26% of commercial queries and 9% of transactional queries.
- The more specific a transactional query is, the less it triggers an AI Overview: 7% for queries of three words or more, typical of facets, against 14% for one- or two-word queries.
- On transactional queries, Google displays a product module in 94% of cases: the battle is fought between category pages and product pages, not with an AI summary.
- The sites most cited in AI Overviews are YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit and Que Choisir. E-commerce merchants do appear there, but rarely.
Google launched the AI Overview in France on July 22, 2026. Since then, nearly all the studies available to measure its impact are American, conducted in a market where the feature has existed for two years. For a French e-commerce merchant, the question is simpler and more urgent: on which of my queries is Google now answering by itself?
We queried Google France with 600 e-commerce queries across twelve sectors in early October 2026. Here is what we observed.
The main result: everything depends on intent
The AI Overview is massively present on questions, and marginal on purchase queries.
| Intent | Example queries | Queries analyzed | With AI Overview |
|---|---|---|---|
| Informational | "combien de croquettes par jour pour un chat", "comment nettoyer une poêle en inox" | 180 | 70% |
| Commercial | "meilleur robot tondeuse", "comparatif aspirateur robot", "poêle inox avis" | 180 | 26% |
| Transactional | "drap housse 160x200", "croquettes pour chat stérilisé", "robe longue" | 239 | 9% |
The French rates are higher than those measured by Seer Interactive in the United States (36%, 8% and 5%). The comparison should remain cautious, because the methodologies differ: our informational panel is made up of explicit questions, introduced by French question words such as "comment", "pourquoi" or "quel", which are precisely the queries on which Seer observes the highest appearance rates, around 86%. But the finding is the same on both sides of the Atlantic: the closer a query is to a purchase, the less Google summarizes it.
Sector by sector
| Sector | Informational | Commercial | Transactional |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kitchen | 93% | 27% | 5% |
| DIY | 87% | 20% | 5% |
| Garden | 87% | 20% | 10% |
| Home linen | 80% | 13% | 5% |
| Baby care | 80% | 13% | 20% |
| Shoes | 73% | 27% | 5% |
| Sports | 73% | 7% | 10% |
| Pet supplies | 67% | 27% | 5% |
| Consumer electronics | 67% | 27% | 5% |
| Fashion | 53% | 60% | 10% |
| Beauty | 40% | 47% | 0% |
| Home appliances | 40% | 27% | 30% |
15 informational queries, 15 commercial and 20 transactional per sector. With samples of this size, differences of a few points between sectors are not significant.
Three sectors stand out:
- Kitchen, DIY and garden: practical questions ("comment culotter une poêle", "quelle essence pour une tondeuse") almost systematically trigger an AI Overview. The "tips" content in these sectors is the most exposed.
- Fashion and beauty: the AI Overview is more frequent on review and comparison queries than on questions. Review and comparison searches, such as "meilleure crème anti-rides", are already often summarized there.
- Home appliances and baby care: these are the only sectors where the AI Overview affects a significant share of transactional queries. We come back to this below.
Specific queries almost always escape it
The 22 transactional queries that display an AI Overview have one thing in common. Most of them are generic queries about complex products, for which the user needs to understand before choosing: "aspirateur laveur", "robot aspirateur et lavage", "vae vélo assistance électrique", "poussette canne", "poussette double". Google adds a summary explaining the different types of products.
As soon as the query becomes specific, the summary disappears.
| Transactional queries | Queries analyzed | With AI Overview |
|---|---|---|
| 1 or 2 words ("aspirateur laveur", "robe femme") | 70 | 14% |
| 3 words or more ("croquettes chat sans céréales", "drap housse 180x200") | 169 | 7% |
| More than 20,000 searches per month | 60 | 17% |
| Fewer than 20,000 searches per month | 179 | 7% |
This is good news for sites that invest in their facets: a category + size, material, color or brand combination corresponds exactly to these long, specific queries, the ones the AI Overview most often leaves alone.
On purchase queries, Google displays products
The AI summary is not the only module that appears ahead of the classic results. On transactional queries, Google displays a product module in 94% of cases (against 72% on commercial queries and 27% on informational ones).
In other words, on a purchase query, the user sees products and links to stores, not a text answering in their place. The competition is fought between your category pages, your product pages and those of your competitors. That is where the quality of your title tags and your meta descriptions makes the difference at the moment of the click.
Who gets cited in AI Overviews?
Each AI Overview cites an average of 5.6 different domains. Across the whole study, the most cited are:
| Rank | Domain | Citations |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | youtube.com | 105 |
| 2 | facebook.com | 39 |
| 3 | instagram.com | 21 |
| 4 | reddit.com | 15 |
| 4 | quechoisir.org | 15 |
| 6 | trustpilot.com | 13 |
| 7 | oogarden.com | 12 |
| 8 | tiktok.com | 11 |
| 9 | lesnumeriques.com | 9 |
| 10 | darty.com, gammvert.fr | 8 |
Video and social platforms dominate, followed by advice media and review sites. A few e-commerce merchants appear (Oogarden, Darty, Gamm vert, Jardiland, Decathlon, Ikea), usually on questions directly related to their catalog.
Being cited has real visibility value. But the American studies show that a citation brings few clicks: Pew Research observed that only 1% of users click a link inside the summary.
What this changes for an e-commerce merchant
1. Your informational content will lose clicks. Seven out of ten questions now display an AI Overview in France. The American studies measure a 58% drop in the click-through rate of the first position in that case (Ahrefs). If a significant share of your organic traffic comes from "how to" articles, expect it to decline in the coming months, even if your rankings do not move.
2. Your category and facet pages become your strongest SEO asset. They target queries the AI Overview rarely touches, which have more volume than the related questions and convert much better. We detail this reasoning in our analysis of e-commerce SEO traffic.
3. Comparison buying guides are no longer a safe haven. A quarter of queries of the "meilleur", "comparatif" or "avis" type already display an AI Overview, and Semrush observes rapid growth on this type of query in the United States.
4. The blog changes role. It now serves as much to be cited by AI systems as to attract visitors. That remains useful for brand awareness, but is measured differently than traffic.
Methodology
- Panel: 600 e-commerce queries from DataForSEO Labs (Google France), spread across twelve sectors. For each sector, we kept the highest-volume queries, after deduplicating spelling variants and excluding off-topic queries (homonyms, store names, cooking recipes for "crème" or "poêle", etc.).
- Intent classification, using explicit and reproducible rules rather than an automatic classifier: informational if the query starts with a question word (comment, pourquoi, quel, combien), commercial if it contains a comparison marker (meilleur, comparatif, avis, test), transactional for product or category queries without those markers.
- Collection: Google France results pages, in French, on desktop, collected on October 5, 2026 via the DataForSEO SERP API, with loading of asynchronous AI Overviews. One query could not be collected, hence 599 usable results.
- Limitations: a snapshot at a given date, on desktop only, without personalization. AI Overview display varies over time and between users, and the French rollout is still recent. The samples per sector (15 to 20 queries per intent) show trends, not precise measurements.
The raw data is public: download the CSV file of the 599 queries. You are free to reuse it, citing unblind.ai as the source.
Frequently asked questions
Since when has the AI Overview been available in France?
Google launched AI Overview and AI Mode in France on July 22, 2026, two years after the United States, after a long standoff over press neighboring rights. The rollout was progressive over the summer.
Does the AI Overview appear on purchase queries?
Rarely. In our study, it appears on 9% of transactional queries, mostly generic queries about technical products such as "aspirateur laveur" or "poussette canne". On specific, facet-style queries, it drops to 7%.
How can you get cited in an AI Overview?
AI Overviews cite an average of 5 to 6 different domains, mostly videos, social networks, forums and advice media. Content that answers the question precisely, is structured and up to date has a better chance of being selected. But being cited brings few clicks: it is a visibility lever, not a sales one.
Is the study data available?
Yes. The CSV file of the 599 queries, with their sector, intent, volume, whether an AI Overview is present and the cited domains, is freely downloadable at the bottom of this page.
Sources
- unblind study data (CSV, 599 queries, October 2026)
- Seer Interactive, AIO Impact on Google CTR: 2026 Update (April 2026)
- Ahrefs, AI Overviews Reduce Clicks by 58% (February 2026)
- Pew Research Center, Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears (July 2025)
- Semrush, AI Overviews are expanding across commercial intent search (July 2026)
- Blog du Modérateur, Google rolls out AI Overviews and AI Mode in France (July 2026)
- DataForSEO, Google SERP API (results collection)