Beyond Organic: The Archive
Beyond Organic is my newsletter on international SEO and AI search. This page collects every past issue. If you'd rather get the next one in your inbox, subscribe here.
Your Guide to AI Overviews in France & the email that made me cry in my kitchen
I just launched a guide for AI Overviews in France, now that we have a few weeks of data to explore, and I’m announcing my talk at the Google Search Central Deep Dive conference in Barcelona!
AI Overviews launched in France
Google launched AI Overviews in France last week, two months ahead of the deadline it had given publishers and with no signed remuneration agreement in place. Here's what the data from other markets shows, and the one thing worth doing before your Q4 numbers move for reasons that have nothing to do with your team.
France gets to see the answers first
France is about to get the most mature version of AI Overviews Google has built, without the two years of trial and error other markets got to watch first. Here's the actual deployment timeline, what German data shows about which pages are exposed, and why that's a genuine advantage with an expiry date.
What is text, anyway?
After Google I/O 2026 showed text being generated at scale by nobody in particular, a look at what text actually does for us: as a vehicle for information, as art, and as the friction that makes thinking visible. Outsourcing the writing might mean outsourcing more than you'd expect.
AI is in the search box now. Fascinating, a little scary, mostly fascinating.
Google just put AI directly into the search box that hadn't changed in 25 years, and it's a bigger structural shift than another product update. What changed at I/O, why measurement is quietly breaking, and what it means for anyone working across markets and languages.
You're in the search results. You're not in the answers.
You can rank first for a query in one market and be completely invisible when an AI tool answers that same query in that language. Translated content quietly fails the test that written-for-market content passes, and the fix is narrower than a full overhaul.
Fast, slow, and what actually holds
January moved fast, and this issue sits with the tension between chasing every new AI development and knowing not everything should be rushed. Starting with why schema markup, unglamorous as it is, still matters more than most strategy conversations give it credit for.