Key findings
0.56%
CTR at position 1, non-brand queries
7,973 impressions on 13 sites. Benchmark: 27.6%
73.5%
Of top-3 queries with 20+ impressions got no click
332 non-brand queries
33x
Brand queries in the top 3 out-clicked non-brand ones
13.19% against 0.4%
8.2%
Of Google impressions came from AI features, median site
12 sites, range 0.1% to 30.1%
- Non-brand queries at position 1 converted 0.56% of impressions into clicks. The top 3 together converted 0.4%, or 0.87% once one query with 49,585 impressions and 8 clicks is set aside.
- Positions 4 to 5 (0.76%) did about as well as the top 3. Below that, CTR fell to 0.34% at positions 6 to 10, 0.24% on page two and 0.06% from position 21 down.
- 73.5% of non-brand top-3 queries with at least 20 impressions got no click in 90 days. On page two it was 88%.
- Desktop carried 84.7% of top-3 impressions but converted them at 0.31%. Mobile converted at 0.89%.
- Brand queries in the top 3 got a 13.19% CTR, 33 times the non-brand rate.
- Question queries at positions 4 to 5 got a quarter of the clicks other queries got there: 0.29% against 1.15%.
- For the median site, 8.2% of Google impressions came from AI features.
Google CTR by position in 2026
Here is the full curve for non-brand queries. Each bar pools every click and every impression in its band, so a query with 10,000 impressions counts 10,000 times and a query with 3 impressions counts 3 times.
Figure 1
Click-through rate by average position, non-brand Google queries
| Position | CTR | Clicks | Impressions | Sites | No click* |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Position 1 | 0.56% | 45 | 7,973 | 13 | 74.7% |
| Position 2 | 0.22% | 137 | 62,212 | 15 | 75.4% |
| Position 3 | 0.89% | 173 | 19,450 | 13 | 70.6% |
| Positions 4 to 5 | 0.76% | 497 | 65,481 | 19 | 76.1% |
| Positions 6 to 10 | 0.34% | 550 | 160,335 | 22 | 82% |
| Positions 11 to 20 | 0.24% | 157 | 64,819 | 21 | 88% |
| Position 21 and lower | 0.06% | 67 | 119,616 | 24 | 97.4% |
* Share of queries with at least 20 impressions in the band that got no click in 90 days.
Why our CTR is far lower than the benchmarks
The best known CTR study, from Backlinko, found that “the #1 result in Google has a CTR of 27.6%”. That study measures a fixed set of tracked keywords. Search Console measures something different. Google counts an impression whenever your link appears on the results page a searcher is viewing, and the position it reports is averaged “across all queries in which your property appeared”, according to Search Console Help.
So a site’s query report holds every long-tail variant, every rank-tracking check and every search that an AI assistant ran on someone’s behalf. Most of those impressions were never going to turn into a click. In our data, 84.7% of non-brand top-3 impressions came from desktop, and the biggest single query at position 2 had 49,585 impressions and 8 clicks.
Neither number is wrong. They answer different questions. A rank-tracker curve tells you what a keyword you chose might be worth. Search Console tells you what your site actually got, and on that measure a top-3 ranking is worth far less than the curve suggests. We looked at the machine-made share of those queries in a companion study: how many Search Console queries come from AI agents.
How many top-3 queries get no click at all?
Most of them. We took every non-brand query with at least 20 impressions in the 90 days and checked whether it earned a single click. In the top 3, 73.5% of 332 queries did not. At positions 6 to 10 it was 82%, on page two 88% and below position 20 97.4%.
A query that ranks at the top and still gets nothing is worth a look. Either the results page answers it before anyone needs to click, or the search had no person behind it. Neither is fixed by rewriting a title tag.
Mobile vs desktop CTR by position
Mobile searchers clicked more at every position. The gap was widest at the top: 0.89% on mobile against 0.31% on desktop in the top 3. We merged positions 1 to 3 here so every bar clears our minimum group size.
Figure 2
Non-brand CTR by position band and device
- Desktop
- Mobile
Brand vs non-brand CTR
Brand queries behave like a different channel. People searching for a product by name clicked 13.19% of the time in the top 3, or 40.92% without the single largest brand query. At positions 4 to 5 brand CTR was 3.28%, and at 6 to 10 it was 0.45%.
Mixing the two hides both. If you report one CTR for a site, a strong brand month will make a weak non-brand month look healthy. Split them before you compare anything.
13.19%
Brand queries, top 3
4,898 impressions, 11 sites
0.4%
Non-brand queries, top 3
89,635 impressions, 16 sites
Do question queries and long queries get fewer clicks?
Questions did, in the middle of page one. Queries that start with how, what, why, when, where, which, who, can, does, is, do, are or should got a 0.29% CTR at positions 4 to 5, against 1.15% for other non-brand queries, and 0.22% against 0.39% at positions 6 to 10. In the top 3 the two were level.
Figure 3
Non-brand CTR for question queries and other queries
- Question queries
- Other queries
Long queries looked the same. Queries of five words or more converted at 0.33% at positions 4 to 5 and 0.23% at 6 to 10, against 1.39% and 0.43% for queries of one to four words. The exception was the top 3, where long queries did slightly better (0.56% against 0.32%).
How often do Google’s AI features show your pages?
Search Console now reports impressions from Google’s AI features separately. For the 12 sites in our study with at least 1,000 Google impressions in the captured window, the median site got 8.2% of its Google impressions from AI features. The spread was wide: from 0.1% to 30.1%, with 4 sites at 10% or more.
Figure 4
Share of Google impressions from AI features, by site
We also tried to compare CTR for pages with a high and a low AI share. Too few sites fell into each group to pass our minimum size, so we have left that comparison out rather than publish a number one site could set.
What to do with these numbers
- Split brand from non-brand first. A 13.19% brand CTR and a 0.4% non-brand CTR average out to a number that describes neither.
- Judge CTR only on queries with demand. With 73.5% of top-3 queries at zero clicks, filter to queries with real impressions and at least a few clicks before you rewrite a title.
- Check desktop and mobile separately. A desktop-heavy query with no clicks is often not a person. A mobile query with no clicks usually is, and that is the one to fix.
- Answer the question on the page. Question queries lose clicks to the results page, so the click you do get has to be worth more: a direct answer near the top, then the detail.
- Make your pages easy for AI features to read. Check that AI crawlers can reach your site with our AI crawler checker, and test your file with the llms.txt validator.
Murkuz connects Google Search Console, GA4 and Bing Webmaster Tools to Claude or ChatGPT, so you can run this split on every site you manage by asking for it:
Show my non-brand CTR by position for the last 90 days, pooled by band.Which top-3 queries had 50+ impressions and no clicks, desktop and mobile separately?Compare brand and non-brand CTR for every site I have connected.
Methodology
29 sites’ anonymized data was used for this study.
Data
Google Search Console performance data (web search) pulled through the Search Console API for the 90 days from 24 July 2026 to 21 October 2026. The sites are small and mid-sized software, SaaS, review and content sites. Over the window they had 1,382,381 Google impressions and 8,024 clicks in total. 25 sites had query-level rows; Search Console withholds rare queries for privacy, so the query rows cover 517,509 impressions and 2,412 clicks across 30,163 queries.
Definitions
- Brand query: contains the site’s own name or product name. Everything else is non-brand (29,609 queries, 499,886 impressions, 1,626 clicks).
- Position: the query’s impression-weighted average position across devices, rounded to a whole number.
- CTR: total clicks divided by total impressions in the band (pooled), not an average of per-query rates.
- Question query: the first word is how, what, why, when, where, which, who, can, does, is, do, are or should.
- AI features share: impressions in Search Console’s AI features report divided by all Google impressions for the same site and window.
Minimum group size
We publish a figure only when it comes from at least 5 sites and at least 1,000 impressions. Smaller groups are marked as too few, and that is why some bands are merged. Where one query dominates a band, we also report the CTR without it.
Download the data
The CSV and JSON hold every published band for every segment, with sites, queries, impressions, clicks, CTR, CTR without the largest query, zero-click share and the device split. Reuse them under CC BY 4.0: credit Murkuz and link to this page. Spotted an error? Email [email protected] and we will correct it and note the change.
Frequently asked questions
What is the average CTR by position on Google in 2026?
In our Search Console data for non-brand queries over 90 days, position 1 had a 0.56% click-through rate, position 3 had 0.89%, positions 6 to 10 had 0.34% and positions 11 to 20 had 0.24%. Public benchmarks built from rank-tracker data put position 1 near 27.6%. The gap comes from what each method counts: Search Console counts every query a page appears for, including thousands of long-tail and machine-made searches that rarely get a click.
What is a good CTR for position 1?
It depends on whether the query has your brand in it. Brand queries in the top 3 converted at 13.19% in our data (40.92% without the single largest query). Non-brand queries at position 1 converted at 0.56%. Compare a page with its own history and with similar queries on your site, not with a single industry curve.
Why is my CTR so low when I rank in the top 3?
Usually because most of those impressions are on queries nobody clicks. 73.5% of non-brand top-3 queries with at least 20 impressions got no click at all in 90 days, and 84.7% of top-3 impressions were on desktop, where CTR was 0.31% against 0.89% on mobile. Filter Search Console to queries with real demand before you judge a title or a snippet.
Is CTR higher on mobile or desktop?
Higher on mobile at almost every position in our data. In the top 3, mobile CTR was 0.89% and desktop CTR was 0.31%. Desktop carried most of the impressions at the top and bottom of the rankings, which pulls the blended number down.
Do question queries get fewer clicks?
Yes, at positions 4 to 5: queries that start with how, what, why, can or similar got a 0.29% CTR, against 1.15% for other non-brand queries. Google often answers a question on the results page, so fewer searchers need to click.
How often do Google's AI features show my pages?
For the median site in our study, 8.2% of Google impressions came from AI features, according to Search Console's AI features report. Across 12 sites the share ran from 0.1% to 30.1%, and 4 sites were at 10% or more.
How do I find my own CTR by position?
Open the Performance report in Search Console, switch on Average CTR and Average position, open the Queries tab and export it. Remove brand queries, group the rest by rounded position, and divide total clicks by total impressions in each group. Pooling clicks and impressions this way stops a handful of tiny queries from swinging the average.
Sources
- Backlinko: We Analyzed 4 Million Google Search Results. Here's What We Learned About Organic Click Through Rate
- Search Console Help: What are impressions, position, and clicks?
- Search Console Help: Performance report (Search results)
- Google Search Central: AI features and your website
About the author
Junaid K., SEO Specialist
I run SEO for 14 sites across eight products: 3,600+ published articles, 50M+ organic search impressions, and organic search as the first growth channel for every launch. Day to day that means Search Console and GA4 analysis, keyword and SERP research, content operations at scale, and catching ranking decay before it costs traffic. These articles are the notes from that work.