Your Guide to AI Overviews in France & the email that made me cry in my kitchen
Hi,
I have two things I've been wanting to tell you for a few weeks now, and both make me a little giddy when I think about them, so bear with me if this one runs long.
Your Guide to AI Overviews in France
The first: for the past month, I've been buried in the two guides I promised you back in July, the week AI Overviews first rolled out in France — Your Guide to AI Overviews in France, one written for French SMBs, one for international businesses with a foothold in France.
I said "a couple of weeks" back then. It took over a month instead. I'm glad I didn't rush it, because what came out the other side is built on a month of real French data instead of launch-day guesses.
One finding that you should take away: a French AI Overview cites a page written natively for a French reader before it cites the same content translated into French for them. Not because translation is bad. Because native and translated content behave as structurally different signals, and most international strategies still treat them as the same asset with a different language file swapped in. It's a small distinction with a large price tag attached, and both guides walk through it in detail.
My biggest announcement of the year
The second thing is the one that actually made me shed a happy tear, standing in my kitchen.
I'm speaking at Google Search Central Live Deep Dive in Barcelona this October!
If you're not familiar, it's a 3-day conference with Google engineers and community speakers, all about crawling, indexing and serving.
🥳
My talk is on the international SEO decisions companies make, or skip, before a market launch, and what it costs to untangle those same decisions afterward instead.
When the acceptance email landed, I jumped around and did a proper happy dance. The teenager I was once dreamed about working at Google one day. I suppose she'd be proud. I'm also one of only three French speakers on the whole programme, and the only French woman, which is its own quiet signal about the year I'm having.
Because that's really what both of these are: signals. This year has turned into a research year for me, more than I ever planned. I'm spending more time reading studies and building real arguments than I expected to, and enjoying it far more than I thought I would. If the guides and Barcelona are anything to go by, I think that shift is starting to pay off.
Talk soon,
Alizée
This was originally sent as an issue of Beyond Organic, my newsletter on international SEO and AI search, on 08 September 2026. If you'd rather get the next one in your inbox than find it here later, subscribe here.
