Organic CTR by position
What is organic CTR by position?
Organic CTR by position, or the CTR curve, describes how the share of searchers who click a result changes with its ranking. The first organic result gets the most clicks, the next few get noticeably fewer, and click-through rate keeps falling down the page, with results on page two getting very few clicks.
The exact numbers vary so much that any single table is misleading. Third-party studies measure different sets of queries and get different figures, and they date quickly as Google adds new features. What stays consistent is the shape: steep at the top, flattening further down. The curve is flatter, and lower, when ads, an AI Overview, a featured snippet or a local pack sit above the organic results, and steeper for branded and navigational searches where people know exactly which result they want.
Why organic CTR by position matters for SEO
The curve explains why small ranking gains near the top matter far more than gains lower down. Moving from 12 to 9 might add a few clicks; moving from 4 to 1 can multiply them. It is how tools estimate traffic from rankings and traffic potential.
Your own curve is more useful than a published one. Plot CTR against average position for your non-branded queries in Search Console, and you have a benchmark for your site. Pages well below your curve at their position are good candidates for a better title and description.
How to build your own CTR curve
- Export queries from the Search Console Performance report for the last three months, with clicks, impressions, CTR and position.
- Remove branded queries, and queries with very few impressions.
- Round positions to whole numbers and, for each position from 1 to 20, total the clicks and impressions, then divide to get CTR.
- Chart CTR against position. Do mobile and desktop separately if you have enough data.
- Flag pages whose CTR is well below the curve for their position and review their titles and snippets.
Organic CTR by position FAQ
What is the CTR of position 1 on Google?
It varies widely by query, device and what else appears above the organic results, and published studies disagree. Use your own Search Console data for non-branded queries as your benchmark.
Do AI Overviews change the CTR curve?
They push organic results further down and can answer the query outright, so CTR for results below them tends to be lower. The size of the effect varies by query.
Related SEO terms
Click-through rate (CTR) is the share of impressions that become clicks: clicks divided by impressions. It shows how often searchers choose your result.
A keyword ranking is the position a page holds in search results for a given query, in a given place and on a given device.
Traffic potential estimates the total organic traffic you could get by ranking first for a topic, counting every related query the top page ranks for.
Zero-click searches are searches that end without a click to any website, because the answer is on the results page or the user gives up.
SERP features are the results on Google’s results page that are not plain blue links, such as AI Overviews, featured snippets, local packs and videos.