Measurement

CTR (click-through rate)

CTR is clicks divided by impressions. In organic search it depends on position, on what else occupies the result page, and on how compelling the title and snippet are.

Published curves put position one around 27 %, position three around 11 % and position eight near 3 %, but those are averages across millions of queries. A branded navigational query at position one can exceed 60 %; a query answered by an AI Overview can halve the whole curve. Compare your CTR against your own history and your own query mix, not against a blog post's table.

When a page has good position and poor CTR after segmentation, titles and descriptions are the cheapest fix in SEO — a rewrite costs an hour and changes revenue without changing rankings. When CTR is low because an AI Overview or a snippet answers the query, no rewrite will help; the response is to target queries where the answer requires a click.

Related terms

Guides on this subject