Studies · France · 12 August 2026
What Google's AI answers actually cite
1,000 French commercial queries run through Google, with the full record of the sources cited by AI Overviews. Wikipedia is cited once out of 4,466 citations.
Key figures
58,6 %
of buying queries trigger an AI answer
68,4 %
of citations go to company sites
1
single citation for Wikipedia, out of 4,466
42,3 %
of cited sites are absent from the classic top 10
Method
A panel of 1,000 commercial and comparative queries in French, spread across 10 sectors with 100 queries each. Each query was submitted to Google France, desktop results in French, on August 12, 2026, via DataForSEO's SERP API with AI Overviews loading enabled. 999 queries produced a usable result. The 100 most cited domains, concentrating 37.3% of citations, were verified one by one and classified manually; the rest relies on lists and automatic rules.
Limitations
A single pass, desktop only, on commercial-intent queries: these figures say nothing about informational queries, and AI Overviews evolve fast. This is a dated snapshot, not a constant. A domain's category does not tell the whole story of the cited page, and counts deduplicate domains within each answer.
The visuals
Click to open at full resolution (1080 x 1440). Each visual already carries the source and the date.
Download
Everything is free to use, including commercially, as long as the source is credited. The visuals already carry the source and the date.
How to cite this study
Wording to reuse as is:
ForgR study, "What Google's AI answers actually cite", 1,000 French commercial queries measured on August 12, 2026. https://forgr.co/en/studies/ai-citations-2026-08/
Press and reuse
A question about the method, a missing angle, a set of queries you would like measured: write to [email protected].