French News Site Visits Fall Nearly 22% in September as Google’s AI Overviews Settle In
Visits to French news websites fell by almost 22% in September compared with a year earlier, two months after Google brought its AI Overviews search summaries to France, according to figures from the ACPM, the body that certifies press and media audiences, AFP reported on October 8 in a dispatch carried by France 24. The average decline across news sites, covering general news outlets, the sports daily L’Equipe and the main business titles, was 21.8%, after 15.3% in August.
Some brands were hit far harder. Le Parisien’s website lost 43.5% of its visits year on year, Franceinfo 32.9%, Le Monde 22.9% and Ouest-France 9.1%. The apps of the same media, which do not depend on search results, held up better, with visits down 12.9% on average.
The ACPM cautioned that it is “not possible to isolate the impact of AI Overview” from these figures. News outlets were already under strain from falling subscriptions, audiences and advertising revenue, and September 2025, the comparison month, was an unusually busy news period that included the fall of François Bayrou’s government. Google, for its part, says its AI features still generate billions of clicks a week to websites.
What it means in practice
AI Overviews, which arrived in France on July 22, places a generated summary drawn from several articles at the top of search results. Publishers fear that readers who get the gist there will not click through to the original reporting, a pattern they say has already cut traffic in the United States. The Apig, which groups nearly 300 French daily newspapers, asked the competition authority on August 11 to examine what it called Google’s “unilateral rollout” of the feature, and the European Union opened an investigation in 2025 into whether the tool harms online publishers and YouTubers.
For an industry that relies on search for a large share of its readers, the question is no longer whether generative AI changes the economics of news but by how much. The figures join other attempts to measure AI’s effects in France, such as the Banque de France study on young people’s permanent hiring, and political pressure for closer oversight, including the LFI bill seeking prior authorisation for general-purpose AI.
What to watch: the ACPM’s October figures, any move by the Autorité de la concurrence on the Apig complaint, and whether French publishers strike licensing or traffic-sharing deals with AI search providers.