Organic Click-Through Rate
Organic click-through rate is how often people click through to your site when it shows up in Google's unpaid search results. Google Search Console works it out as clicks divided by impressions, the times your site appeared. Its Performance report shows CTR for your whole site, each page and each search.
Source: Search Console Help, Performance report (Search results): Overview and basic setup, checked October 29, 2026
What Organic Click-Through Rate means for your business
A falling CTR can mean your listing isn't getting picked. It can also mean your site started showing up for more searches it was never likely to win, which adds impressions and few clicks. The chart looks the same either way, so before we'd touch a title, we'd sort the report by search and by page. We'd also read the searches for your name apart from the rest, since someone looking for you behaves differently from someone comparing options.
Some searches end on the results page, because the answer is right there. Clicks and impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode are already counted in the Performance report, mixed in with the rest, so your CTR includes them. Search Console's separate generative AI report counts only how often your links appeared there, with no clicks, so you can't pull out a click rate for AI answers alone.
Where a page shows up often and rarely gets the click, we'd put its title and description next to the results around it and ask whether they say what the page delivers.
If your clicks are falling and you can't tell whether it matters, what we measure beside them puts the phone calls and bookings first.
Last reviewed October 29, 2026. All terms
How AI answers it today
On October 29, 2026, Google's AI Overview gave the clicks-divided-by-impressions formula with position benchmarks from SEO tool makers' studies, citing them, Databox and YouTube but no Google page. ChatGPT gave the same formula and a benchmark table it called illustrative, with no sources.
Our run through ChatGPT and Google's AI Overview, October 29, 2026. A sample, not what every buyer sees.
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