What's a Good Click-Through Rate by Google Ranking Position?

A page with a 3% click-through rate could be doing great — or it could be badly underperforming. The number alone doesn't tell you which. What matters is how that CTR compares to what pages ranking in the same position typically earn, because click-through rate isn't flat across the search results page. It falls off sharply the further down you go.

That's the piece most people miss when they look at Search Console: a low CTR on a page ranking #9 might be completely normal, while the same CTR on a page ranking #2 is a real problem worth fixing today.

Why CTR varies so much by position

Searchers scan results from the top down, and most never make it past the first few listings. The result is a steep drop-off: position 1 results capture roughly a quarter to a third of all clicks on a typical query, position 2 and 3 capture noticeably less, and by the time you're past position 10 — the bottom of page one — CTR is often in the low single digits. Page two results, despite still being "ranked," get a small fraction of that.

Plenty of factors shift these numbers around — branded queries, featured snippets stealing clicks from position 1, local packs pushing organic results down — but the general shape holds across almost every industry: higher position means dramatically higher CTR, not a little higher.

Rough CTR benchmarks by position

These vary by query type and industry, but as a general reference point for organic (non-paid, non-featured-snippet) results:

Position 1 — CTR is typically in the high teens to high twenties percent
Position 2–3 — usually drops to somewhere in the 8–15% range
Position 4–6 — commonly falls in the 3–7% range
Position 7–10 — often 1–3%
Position 11+ (page two) — usually well under 1%

Treat these as a sanity check, not gospel — the exact numbers shift by niche, by whether the query is informational or transactional, and by how much SERP real estate ads and snippets are eating up. What matters is the shape of the curve, not the precise percentage.

How to find your own CTR-by-position data

Open Google Search Console, go to the Search results performance report, and enable both the Average CTR and Average Position columns. Click into the Pages tab, then sort by position to group pages roughly by where they rank.

From there it's manual comparison work: for every page, note its average position, note its CTR, and judge whether that CTR looks reasonable for a page ranking there. A page averaging position 4.2 with a 1.5% CTR is a clear gap — it should be earning closer to 4–7%. A page averaging position 14 with a 0.5% CTR is completely normal and not worth touching.

Doing this for a handful of pages is quick. Doing it for every page on a site with hundreds of indexed URLs is where it stops being practical by hand — which is exactly the kind of repetitive comparison a traffic gap analysis tool is built to automate, scoring every page against its position benchmark at once instead of one spreadsheet row at a time.

What to do about a CTR gap once you've found one

A CTR gap is good news, in a sense: the hard part — ranking — is already done. The fix is almost always about the title tag and meta description, not the content itself:

Rewrite the title to match the query more directly. If the page ranks for "best project management software" but the title reads like a generic product name, searchers have no reason to trust it's the right result.
Add a specific, credible detail. A number, a year, a differentiator — "2026 comparison," "12 tools tested" — gives searchers a reason to pick your result over a near-identical one above or below it.
Write the meta description like ad copy. Google doesn't always use it, but when it does, a description that speaks directly to the searcher's intent outperforms a vague summary every time.
Check for competing SERP features. If a featured snippet, People Also Ask box, or local pack is eating clicks above your result, no amount of title rewriting will fully fix the gap — that's a different problem to solve.

Re-check CTR two to three weeks after any title change — Google needs to re-crawl and searchers need time to actually see the new listing before the number moves.