Transactional queries and a strong presence on Reddit favor citations. A multi-channel brand, own technique and unique content are also assets.
Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode are coming to France this summer. What about regulatory obstacles, particularly posed by French law on neighboring rights ? Since 2019, it has required digital platforms to pay press publishers for the use of their content. AI-generated summaries pose a major legal problem. They leverage these articles to provide direct answers without sending traffic back to the source sites. Since then, the American giant has received various fines from the French Competition Authority. Concerns related to the local application of the DSA, DMA and GDPR could also be involved.
“Honestly, I don’t think this will be resolved in the very short term,” points out Gaël Mahédigital law lawyer at Haas Avocats. “If AI Overview is deployed quickly in France, it risks being, initially, in a restricted manner, the time to regulate the situation.”
Take advantage of transactional queries
In any case, for publishers, it is now imperative to review what the American markets have been able to teach them recently with AI Overviews. First of all, the functionality now serves over 2.5 billion monthly users. The number of sources cited per response has doubled. According to QuickSEOAI Overviews contain an average of 13.34 sources per response, compared to 6.82 in 2024.
If the click-through rate is not very high, the drop in it remains variable depending on the type of query. It is focused on informational and educational content, but is relatively spared on transactional and e-commerce content. The conversion of visitors who click despite everything is increasing sharply. According to Authoritytech and many other studies, even if click volume drops, visitors who click from an AI Overview would convert at a significantly higher rate than average.
In this situation, being currently present on Reddit can be interesting. This dominates the quote, ahead of all the classic editorial sites. Of the Profound/SE Ranking/Ahrefs aggregates combined in 2025 and 2026, Reddit represents 21% of citations in AI Overviews. This makes it the first source cited inside Google AI Overviews specifically.
Being present on it can therefore be interesting. A “success story” ofa client of the Diggity agency Marketing explains that the latter saw its AI traffic multiplied by 28 thanks to a Reddit strategy. To do this, he created human and authentic profiles. Six styles of commentary established its credibility: those that were practical, those with personal anecdotes, and those with step-by-step mini-guides. Also, those with completed answers, those with numerical proofs and those with brand mentions, when it was useful. Be careful though, as more and more companies are buying fake AI posts to flood Reddit. They manage to trick ChatGPT and Google, which validates them as real reviews. But until when?
The gain of information highlighted
To appear more in Google AI Overviews citations, it’s also about, in accordance with Google’s guide to “Optimizing your website for generative AI features in Google Search”, where possible, producing content that is “useful, reliable and people-first.” We think of Google’s Information Gain, advocating non-generic content. As with SEO, it is therefore recommended to write not for AI but for users, and to provide a unique point of view.
And watch out for abuse. AI Overviews’ quality filter appears to rely largely on source trust signals, not content verification. Bad information can damage a brand’s image.
At the start of 2026, the journalist Thomas Germain invented a fake hot dog eating championship on his site. He placed first in this competition. In less than 24 hours, many major chatbots took the bait and spread his hoax. Google Gemini and AI Overviews repeated his false statements verbatim in their responses. ChatGPT also repeated this false information, presenting it as fact to users.
Work on the brand across different channels
We can add, as recommended by Googlethe importance of the technical aspect of GEO. Facilitating the crawling and indexing of pages by Google robots or having a site that displays correctly and quickly constitute the basics. We could add the fact of working on your brand, particularly via different channels: media, social networks, forums, reviews, quotes, videos, etc.
Recent example of success in this area: Description, specializing in video editing software, holds its own against Adobe in terms of Semrush’s AI visibility score. The reason would partly come from the fact that the company with fewer than 200 employees was able to make its brand work on different channels on what it knew how to do best: editing podcasts. To do this, she above all favors a natural approach to writing and a clear product positioning. The strength of mentions on different channels associated with its brand partly did the rest.
