Google answers more, people click less. What that means for your website
By Viribus · · 5 min read
Last week five French publisher groups filed a complaint with the European Commission about Google’s AI answers in search. Their argument is simple: Google summarises their work at the top of the page, and fewer people click through. The complaint is about news sites, but the effect reaches every business that gets visitors from Google, including yours.
What happened
On 29 October 2026, five French press and publisher organisations (CPA, FNPS, GESTE, SEPM and SPIIL) announced a joint complaint to the European Commission about AI Overviews, the AI summaries above the search results. The complaint text itself has not been published.
It adds to a case that is already open. The Commission started a formal antitrust investigation in December 2025 into whether Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode break competition rules. That investigation is still running; there is no decision yet.
Why it matters in Belgium
This is not a French problem. Google rolled out AI Mode, its chat-style search, in Belgium in October 2025, in Dutch and French among other languages. Belgian publishers reported mixed effects at the time: DPG Media said the impact on its traffic was minimal, Roularta saw fewer visitors coming from Google.
What the click studies show
The numbers come from different methods, but they point the same way.
- Pew Research Center found that people clicked a traditional search result 8% of the time when an AI summary appeared, against 15% when none appeared.
- Ahrefs found in February 2026 that AI Overviews go together with a 58% lower click-through rate for top-ranking pages, nearly double the 34.5% drop it measured in April 2025.
- Chartbeat, which measures more than 2,500 news sites, saw Google search referrals fall by 33% in 2025.
These studies mostly measure informational searches and news. A search like “plumber Berchem” or “accountant Antwerp price” behaves differently: people still want to call someone. So the loss is real, but it is uneven.
What it means for a business website
The searches likely to suffer most are general questions, the kind a blog post answers in its first paragraph. Google can now answer those itself. The searches that hold up are the ones where someone is close to a decision: a service, a place, a price, a name.
That changes what a website is for. Fewer people arrive to read, and the ones who do arrive are further along. A site that gets them to a quote, a booking or a call in two clicks does better than a site that only ranks well.
What to do now
- Open Google Search Console and compare impressions and clicks over the last year. Rising impressions with falling clicks often means people found the answer on Google.
- Count leads, not visits. Track form sends, calls and bookings, so a drop in traffic does not hide a stable or rising number of enquiries.
- Make service pages concrete. Say what you do, where, for whom, from what price, and how soon. A summary cannot replace a clear offer with a name and a phone number behind it.
- Put the next step on every page. A visible contact button, a short form, a booking link. The visitors who do click deserve no detours.
- Keep the site fast and readable as plain HTML. Search engines and AI tools read what the server sends; content that only appears after heavy scripts run is easier to miss.
How we build for this
We start every site from the question of what a visitor should do next, and design the pages around that, not around a word count. Every page of our own site is prerendered to plain HTML, fast on a phone, with accessibility and search basics built in. We build client sites the same way, so what Google and its AI read is the same clear page your customers see.
Wondering whether your site still turns searches into enquiries? Book a free 30-minute call and we will look at it with you.
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