Click-Through Rate (CTR)

Click-through rate is the share of people who click your result after seeing it: clicks divided by impressions. In Search Console you can see it for any query or page. It tells you how compelling your listing is relative to how often it shows up.

Use CTR diagnostically. Position drives most of it, so compare against the expected CTR for your average position: a page ranking third with a CTR far below the curve for position three is telling you the title, meta description, or URL is losing the click — a cheap fix that needs no new content or links. Rewrite titles to lead with the benefit or the specific, and let rich results earn extra visual pull.

CTR is a lever and a warning light, but be careful reading it in the AI-Overview era — impressions now include appearances where the overview absorbs the click, deflating CTR for reasons unrelated to your snippet. Senior practitioners segment CTR by query type before drawing conclusions, prioritise title-and-snippet optimisation on high-impression pages as some of the fastest ROI in SEO, and avoid over-optimising toward clickbait that tanks downstream conversion.