Click-through rate

Click-through rate is the share of people who clicked after seeing something. Take the number of clicks, divide by the number of times the listing or advert was shown, and express it as a percentage. It answers exactly one question: of the people who saw you, how many thought you were worth choosing.

In short

• Clicks divided by impressions, as a percentage.
• It measures whether your listing was chosen, not whether it worked.
• It cannot be read without knowing your position.
• No industry benchmark is worth comparing yourself to.

The arithmetic

A page appeared in Google results 2,000 times last month and was clicked 60 times. Sixty divided by two thousand is 0.03, so the click-through rate is 3 per cent. Impressions are the part people misread. An impression is counted when your listing was shown, which includes appearing at position eight where most people never scroll. So a low rate can mean a dull title, or it can mean you were technically present and practically invisible. The number cannot tell the two apart, and the position column sitting next to it can.

Why a benchmark from a blog post is useless

The figure moves so much with circumstance that a single number carries almost no information.

Somebody searching for your business by name is already coming to you and will click at a rate no other search matches. Somebody typing a broad category is browsing several options and will click a few of them or none. First position collects far more than fourth, and fourth collects far more than tenth. A zero-click search, where Google answers on the result page with an address, a map or a summary, may produce thousands of impressions and very few clicks, because the person got what they needed without leaving.

None of that is a fault in your marketing. It is the shape of that particular search. The only comparison that survives all this is your own page against its own history, or two of your own adverts against each other for the same search.

Reading it properly

The rate on its own is close to meaningless. Paired with two other columns it becomes one of the more useful things in Search Console.

• Rate against position. A poor rate at position two is a genuine problem and a fixable one. The same rate at position nine is just what position nine looks like.
• Rate against impressions. High impressions and few clicks means you are appearing for searches you do not deserve, or your title is not answering them. The list of queries underneath will usually say which.
• Rate against what happened next. A page that wins clicks and produces no inquiries has a page problem, not a listing problem.

Sort a Search Console export by impressions and look at the top thirty rows. The pages with lots of impressions and a weak rate for their position are the shortest route to more visits that exists, because the ranking work is already done.

What actually changes it in search results

Two lines of text and an address. That is what a searcher judges you on.

The title tag is doing most of the work, and the most common fault is that it was written for a search engine rather than a person. A title that repeats a service three times is not more persuasive, it is less. Naming the thing plainly, then adding the one detail that separates you from the listing above, is most of the craft.

The description is not used for ranking and is read by the person deciding, which is a reasonable trade. Google rewrites it often, and usually when it does not match the search well. Being specific about what the page actually contains reduces how often that happens.

Structured markup used to be the other lever here, and most advice about it is now out of date. The dropdown of questions under a result was retired in May 2026, and self-serve review stars stopped appearing for ordinary service businesses years before that. Shops selling products can still earn a price and a rating in the listing. Everybody else is working with the title and the description, which is why those two lines deserve more attention than they get. The structured data entry has the current list of what still shows.

Where it carries more weight

Email is the plainest case, and it has become plainer. A click there is one of the few things in the report that a person definitely did, which matters now that the open rate printed above it counts machines alongside readers.

In advertising the same number stops being purely diagnostic and starts costing money. Every search runs an auction, and the auction weighs your bid against how likely the advert is to be clicked, how relevant it is, and what the page behind it is like. An advert people scroll past therefore competes worse and costs more, which is the opposite of the intuition that a cheap click is a cheap click. Quality Score, the one to ten number in your account, reports those same signals back to you afterwards. It is a thermometer rather than a thermostat, and Google is explicit that it is not itself an input to the auction. How the auction is put together is on the Google Ads entry.

The practical version: an advert underperforming for its position is usually an advert written for a slightly different search than the one it is appearing for. Fix the match rather than the adjectives.

Words you will hear

• Impression. One appearance of your listing or advert, whether or not anybody scrolled far enough to see it.
• Position. Where you appeared. Reported as an average, which hides a page that swings between second and ninth.
• Title tag. The clickable line in the results, and the single biggest influence on whether anybody chooses you.
• Meta description. The two lines underneath. Not used for ranking, and rewritten by Google when it does not match the search.
• Expected click-through rate. Google Ads’ estimate of how likely your advert is to be clicked, weighed in the auction before anybody sees it.
• SERP feature. A map, an answer, an advert block or anything else occupying space above the ordinary results and absorbing clicks.

The trap

A rising click-through rate is not automatically good news, and this is worth saying because dashboards present it as though it were.

A title promising something the page does not contain will lift the rate and lower everything after it. People arrive, understand within seconds that this is not what was advertised, and leave. The listing got better at collecting clicks and the business got nothing, while the number on the report went up.

That is why the figure is read as one of a pair. Click-through rate tells you whether people chose you. Whether choosing you led anywhere is the conversion rate, and only the two together describe what happened.