According to the ACPM, news websites have lost nearly a quarter of their visits in a year, two months after the arrival in France of Google’s AI summaries, while their apps have declined significantly less. In this context, being cited by an AI is no longer enough, and the question shifts to a service’s ability to be directly solicited by an agent.
- Les sites d’information perdent 23 % de visites en un an, tandis que leurs applications ne reculent que de 9 %.
- Être cité par une IA ne suffit plus, car un agent doit pouvoir solliciter directement le service.
- Sur mobile, l’assistant passe par les applications installées, grâce à App Intents pour Apple et AppFunctions pour Google.
- Une page web ne peut pas s’enregistrer auprès de l’assistant, et chaque plateforme impose son propre kit.
For twenty years, internet users learned to search: they typed a few words into Google, then clicked on the most promising link. This gesture is declining. Even before AI summaries, more than half of searches ended without a click, according to a SparkToro study cited by the source, which counted nearly six out of ten in Europe. On July 22, Google launched its AI Overviews in France, an AI-generated summary displayed above the links.
The first French figures, based on data from the ACPM, the organization that certifies media audience, were published in October. Among 40 news brands compared by The Media Leader, websites lost 23% of their visits between September 2025 and September 2026. The source notes that last year saw a news peak and that Google modified Discover in the meantime, but that in August, without this peak, the decline had already reached 19%.
Being cited is no longer enough
The first response from marketing and SEO teams was to transpose SEO to AI, known as GEO, for Generative Engine Optimization. This approach remains a showcase logic: one hopes the AI will read the page and extract the correct answer. The other path is to make a service available for agents, these AIs that act on behalf of the user. The MCP protocol describes to an agent the tools a service makes available to it, and Chrome is testing WebMCP this year, a proposed standard allowing a page to declare its actions to the browser’s agent.
The difference appears in concrete requests. For a question about weekend releases, an agent reading a few event sites can produce an incomplete or outdated list, whereas an agenda accessible directly provides an up-to-date answer. To book a padel court, no citation is sufficient: a service is needed that allows an agent to make the reservation.
On mobile, the assistant goes through applications
With iOS 27, Siri should be able to act and search within apps from a phrase, and Android is following a comparable trajectory with Gemini. According to Apple, the new Siri is not available on European iPhones, and actions in third-party apps are coming “soon.”
To be used by the phone’s assistant, a service must go through native kits, App Intents for Apple and AppFunctions for Google, integrated into an installed app. A web page cannot register. There is not yet a common standard on mobile: each platform has its own kit, and actions must be declared twice.
Competition is also changing in nature. On the web, a service competes with all the sites the AI can read. On the phone, the assistant only chooses among the apps installed by the person. On Android, when several apps can do the same thing, Gemini defaults to the last one it used. Since December 2025, ChatGPT also has its own directory of apps, built on MCP and validated by OpenAI, which the user calls by name or which ChatGPT suggests. These apps are not yet available in Europe.
News apps, for their part, are holding up better. While websites lost 23% of visits, their apps lost 9%, and only 2.5% in August. At Ici, the former France Bleu, website visits were more than halved, while app visits increased by 22%.
