What Is a Good Organic CTR? 2026 Benchmarks by Position

A good organic CTR depends on your position and on whether Google shows an AI answer above you. In First Page Sage's September 2026 report, the #1 organic result earns 22.6% of clicks when no AI answer appears, 3.6% when one does, and 7.1% blended across U.S. searches, so the most reliable benchmark is the one you build from your own Search Console data, position by position.

This guide is for e-commerce and Shopify teams who want to know whether their click-through rate is a problem. You'll get the current published benchmarks from named studies, why they disagree so much, a step-by-step method to compute your own benchmark in Search Console, and a table for diagnosing pages that fall short. If you want the deeper comparison of position 1 versus position 3, see Google position 1 vs position 3; for tactics to lift CTR, see our SERP CTR guide.

What is a good organic CTR?

Organic CTR is clicks divided by impressions, multiplied by 100. Google's Search Console help defines CTR as "the click count divided by the impression count." A page with 5,000 impressions and 150 clicks has a 3% CTR.

"Good" only means something relative to an expected rate for the same position and the same kind of query. A 2% CTR at position 8 can be excellent. A 4% CTR at position 1 on a query with no AI answer is weak. That gives you three practical tests:

• Against published benchmarks: is your CTR in the same range as current studies for your position? Useful for a sanity check, not for targets.
• Against your own benchmark: is this query's CTR below the average of your other non-branded queries at the same position? This is the test that finds fixable pages.
• Against itself over time: did CTR fall while position held steady? That usually means the results page changed, or a competitor's listing got better.

Organic CTR benchmarks by Google position

The most recent position-by-position benchmark is First Page Sage's report "Google Click-Through Rates (CTRs) by Ranking Position in 2026," last updated September 22, 2026. Its methodology section says the dataset covers 1,184 client and panel domains, 3.67 billion Google impressions and 41.2 million clicks recorded between March 1 and August 31, 2026, blended across desktop and mobile and weighted to U.S. query volume.

First Page Sage reports each position three ways: on results pages with an AI answer, without one, and blended. It recommends the blended column for traffic forecasting and the split columns for strategy.

Two other findings in the same report matter for benchmarking. First Page Sage says blended position 1 CTR fell from 39.8% in its 2025 report to 7.1%, and that AI answers appeared on 81.6% of U.S. queries as of September 2026, up from 23.4% in September 2025. It also reports that the top 3 organic results now capture 77.1% of the remaining organic clicks. Those are First Page Sage's figures from its own client panel, so treat them as one study's view, not a Google statistic.

What older studies said

Backlinko's widely cited study by Brian Dean analyzed 4 million Google results, using Search Console data supplied by Semrush, and found the #1 result had an average CTR of 27.6% and was 10 times more likely to be clicked than the #10 result. That dataset predates AI Overviews, so it is useful history but no longer a target. The gap between 27.6% then and 3.6% to 22.6% now is the clearest sign that a benchmark is only as good as its date.

How AI Overviews changed CTR benchmarks

The biggest reason old benchmarks fail is AI answers on the results page. Two named studies measured the effect in different ways.

Ahrefs: position 1 CTR down 58% with an AI Overview

Ahrefs studied 300,000 keywords (150,000 with an AI Overview and 150,000 informational keywords without one), using aggregated Search Console desktop CTR. In its April 2025 study, the presence of an AI Overview correlated with a 34.5% lower CTR for the top-ranking page. When Ahrefs re-ran the study with December 2025 data (published February 4, 2026), the figure rose to 58%. Its position 1 CTR for AI Overview keywords fell from 0.073 in December 2023 to 0.016 in December 2025. The effect shrinks lower on the page but never disappears.

Seer Interactive: a partial rebound in early 2026

Seer Interactive's "AIO Impact on Google CTR: 2026 Update" (April 2026) tracked 53 brands, 5.47 million queries and 2.43 billion organic impressions from January 2025 to February 2026. Organic CTR on queries with an AI Overview fell from 3.2% in January 2025 to a floor of 1.3% in December 2025, then recovered to 2.4% in February 2026. On queries without an AI Overview, organic CTR rose from 2.8% to 3.8% over the same period. Seer describes its data as directional.

Note that Seer's figures are averages across all tracked queries and positions, not position 1, which is why they are far lower than the position-level numbers above. Seer also found that brands cited inside the AI Overview saw clicks hold flat while impressions more than doubled, a reminder to look at clicks and impressions separately before you call a CTR drop a problem. For the bigger picture on searches that end without a click, read what zero-click searches are.

Why published CTR benchmarks disagree

If you line up the studies, position 1 CTR ranges from 1.6% to 27.6%. None of them is wrong. They measure different things.

Beyond method, four things move CTR at the same position:

• Brand intent. First Page Sage notes that its high "No AI Answer" CTRs mostly represent people returning to sites they already know. Branded queries inflate any average.
• Query type. Seer found AI Overviews triggered on 95.4% of comparison queries and 85.9% of question-format queries in its informational set. Product and category searches behave differently from "how to" searches.
• SERP features. Ads, Shopping results, local packs, video and People Also Ask boxes all take clicks before your listing.
• Device. Mobile and desktop show different layouts, so the same position can sit above or below the fold.

How to calculate your own CTR benchmark

Your own data already controls for your brand strength, your industry and the SERP features your queries trigger. Here is how to turn a Search Console export into a benchmark you can act on.

1. Open the Performance report. In Search Console, go to Performance, then Search results. Set search type to Web, choose the last 3 months, and turn on all four metrics: clicks, impressions, CTR and position.
2. Remove branded queries. Add a Query filter that excludes your brand name and its common misspellings (the custom regex option makes this easy). Branded CTR belongs in its own benchmark.
3. Export the Queries table. Search Console tables show a maximum of 1,000 rows, so for a large store pull the data through the API or the Looker Studio connector, or export by page type in batches.
4. Drop low-impression rows. Keep queries with enough impressions to be stable. A threshold of 100 impressions over 3 months is a reasonable start; raise it for large sites.
5. Bucket by rounded position. Round average position to the nearest whole number for positions 1 to 5, then group 6 to 10 and 11 to 20.
6. Compute CTR per bucket the right way. Add up all clicks in the bucket and divide by all impressions in the bucket. Don't average the CTR column, because that gives a 2-impression query the same weight as a 20,000-impression one.
7. Split where it matters. Repeat for mobile and desktop, and for page types such as product pages, collections and blog posts. These are your benchmarks.
8. Flag the gaps. Mark any query earning less than half of its bucket's CTR, then sort by impressions so the biggest opportunities rise to the top.

Our free Search Console Quick Wins Analyzer does most of these steps for you: upload a queries export and it surfaces near page one keywords and CTR gaps worth fixing first. To see what closing a gap is worth, plug the numbers into the CTR and Ranking Value Calculator.

A worked example

Here is what the output might look like for a mid-size store's non-branded web queries over 3 months. These are illustrative numbers, not a real client.

Now take one collection page query at position 3 with 4,000 impressions and 40 clicks, a 1.0% CTR. At this store's own 3.0% benchmark it would earn 120 clicks, so the gap is 80 clicks over 3 months on one query, with no ranking change needed.

How to diagnose a low organic CTR

Once you have flagged queries below benchmark, look at the live results page for each one before changing anything. The cause is usually visible.

Our Title Tag and Meta Description Checker previews your snippet in pixels before you publish, and the Keyword Cannibalization Checker finds queries where your pages compete. For copy guidance, see title tag best practices and meta description best practices.

When CTR is the wrong metric to chase

CTR is a ratio, so it can move for reasons that have nothing to do with your listing.

• Rising impressions can lower CTR. When a page starts ranking for many new long-tail queries at positions 15 to 40, impressions jump and blended CTR falls, even though clicks grew. Seer saw a version of this for cited brands, whose impressions more than doubled while clicks stayed flat. Always check clicks first.
• AI citations don't always show up as clicks. First Page Sage reports that the first cited source in an AI answer earns a 5.2% CTR, but being cited also builds brand familiarity that may show up later as branded searches.
• Revenue beats clicks. A product page with a 2% CTR that converts is worth more than a blog post with a 6% CTR that doesn't. Rank your fixes by clicks gained multiplied by the page's revenue per visit.

Use CTR to find listings that underperform their position. Use clicks, conversions and revenue to decide which ones to fix first. Our Search Console Comparison Tool shows which queries and pages gained or lost clicks between two periods, which is the fastest way to separate a CTR problem from a demand change.

Turn your CTR benchmark into a plan

Set your benchmark this week: export 3 months of non-branded queries, compute CTR by position bucket, and list the 20 queries with the biggest click gap. Fix titles and structured data on those pages first, then re-measure after 4 to 6 weeks against the same benchmark. Rebuild the benchmark every quarter, because AI answers and SERP layouts keep changing what normal looks like. If you want help turning the gaps into prioritized fixes with the revenue math attached, talk to our team, or see how we approach AI search optimization.