AI Overviews: Avoiding American Mistakes Between Sanctions and Branding

The simultaneous arrival of AI Overviews and AI Mode in France has accelerated effects already observed in the United States. Anti-spam sanctions, click losses, and unsuccessful attempts to recover traffic: the signals are well-known. For Karine Abbou, it is essential to rethink governance, abandon short-term tactics, and focus on brand and marketing-sales coordination.

Google Cracks Down on "Scaled Content" Since 2024, with Effects in 2025-2026

Since March 2024, Google has implemented an anti-spam policy targeting "scaled content abuse," whether generated by humans or AI. Manual actions have been in place since June 2025, and anti-spam updates in 2026 have affected various sites. In the United States, shortcuts, particularly the mass production of AI content, have been penalized. According to Karine Abbou, these practices can lead to significant sanctions.

Click and Job Losses, Resilient Revenues: Mixed Indicators

Business Insider has lost 55% of its search traffic in three years and cut 21% of its workforce. In contrast, HubSpot has seen its traffic decline while its revenue continues to grow. In France, nine days after the launch, nearly one in two major sites had lost more than 10% of its clicks without losing position, according to Ahrefs. In the United States, players have attempted for a year to recover this traffic, without success.

Lawsuits, Catch-Up Race, and "Hacks": Ineffective Reflexes

A first reflex has been to initiate legal actions. France has blocked two years under neighboring rights, while there are no equivalents in the United States, where media and authors were the first to oppose. Subsequently, many companies have sought to recover lost traffic. A third reflex, visible in France, involves purchasing tracking tools, reducing SEO teams, reallocating SEO budgets to public relations, and entrusting GEO to communication departments, often the least equipped. Meanwhile, the use of AI Overviews and AI Mode has increased; a lawsuit generally does not halt usage, and Google has launched while users have adopted. According to Karine Abbou, French brands can avoid these costly detours, as American ones have already faced the consequences.

The Problem is Primarily Organizational, Not Technical

The most costly mistakes stem from governance and a poor understanding of AI's impact on search. GEO, the evolution of SEO, accompanies a paradigm shift: fewer clicks, less traffic, and an AI that interposes itself between the user and the site, even questioning the very function of the site. Many initially turned to visibility tactics in AIs, as seen in the early days in America. It is now accepted in the United States that succeeding in AI Search requires rethinking the relationship between marketing and sales at all levels. Among the recurring mistakes: entrusting all GEO to SEO teams alone, cutting content budgets when traffic drops, and transferring all these budgets to public relations by outsourcing tactics and strategy.

Focusing on Brand, Offline Presence, and Steering at the Executive Committee Level

For Karine Abbou, the central issue is the return of brand and awareness, rather than the number of citations in LLMs or the multiplication of press releases. Awareness beneficial to AIs is often built offline: in the United States, physical events, small-group meetings, and communities are developing, both for small local brands and large groups and personal brands. In France, GEO is almost always entrusted to communication teams with the tightest budgets, who are expected to deliver ambitious results. The most astute teams bring the subject to the executive committee and promote cross-functionality between marketing and sales. The simultaneous arrival of AI Overviews and AI Mode has accelerated the effects observed elsewhere, rendering the volume logic obsolete: many believed they could publish much more with AI, but this leads, according to her, to making mistakes more quickly.