Click-through rate is the share of people who saw your result and clicked it: clicks divided by impressions, shown as a percentage in Search Console. It falls steeply with position, so it only means anything when compared against the position it was earned at. Whether Google uses clicks to rank is a question with two honest halves, covered below.
What normal looks like
The first organic result typically takes somewhere between a quarter and a third of clicks, the second around half of that, and by position ten the rate is in low single figures. Any result under an AI Overview or a map pack takes less than the same position would without one. Exact figures vary by industry and by query, so the useful comparison is your own rate against your own position, page by page.
A page at position three with a two percent rate is underperforming. A page at position nine with a two percent rate is doing fine.
How to read yours
In Search Console, look at queries and pages with high impressions, a position between roughly three and ten, and a rate well below what that position should earn. Those are pages being seen and passed over. The usual causes are a title that does not match what the searcher wanted, a description that says nothing, a date that makes the page look old, or a bigger result above stealing the click.
The fix is almost always the title. Rewrite it to promise what the searcher typed, keep the promise on the page, and watch the rate for a fortnight.
Does it affect rankings?
Google's public position for many years has been that it does not use click-through rate as a direct ranking signal, and that behaviour such as returning to the results page is too noisy to rank on. Google's staff have said this repeatedly and it should be taken seriously.
In the 2023 antitrust trial, testimony from Google's search leadership described a system that uses aggregated click behaviour over months to adjust rankings, and internal documents made public in 2024 named click-related measures. So the fuller answer is: not your page's rate in isolation, but user behaviour in aggregate does feed Google's systems in some form. Both things are true, and neither changes what you should do, which is write results people want to click and pages that satisfy them when they do.
What not to do
Buy clicks. Services that send bots to search for your keyword and click your result exist, they can move rankings temporarily, and they leave a pattern in Search Console that is easy to spot: impressions and clicks spiking on a schedule with no matching change in real traffic. Google's systems are built to detect exactly that, and the ranking falls back the moment the bots stop.
Sources
Where this shows up in the tracker
Every term in this glossary is something the product actually measures or acts on. Plans start at £29 a month, with rank tracking, AI visibility, the daily AI readiness scan, security and domain health, Search Console, backlinks and audits on every one of them.
Related terms
Title tag
The page title is the text in a page's title element, shown as the clickable headline in search results. Google uses it as the main source for that headline, along with the visible heading, link text and other prominent text, and will rewrite it when it judges the title unhelpful. A good title says specifically what the page is, in the words the searcher used, without padding.
Pogo-sticking
Pogo-sticking is when a searcher clicks a result, comes straight back to the results page, clicks another, and repeats until something satisfies them. Google has said publicly that it does not use it as a ranking signal, because people go back for too many reasons. Testimony in the 2023 antitrust trial confirmed that Google does use aggregated click behaviour over long periods. Both statements can be true, and neither changes what a page needs to do.
Dwell time
Dwell time is the time between a searcher clicking a result and returning to the search results page. It is a concept from the SEO industry, not a metric Google publishes or has confirmed using. Bounce rate is an analytics figure, the share of visits that view one page, and Google's ranking systems have no access to your analytics at all. Both are worth watching for what they say about your pages, not for what they do to your rankings.
Featured snippet
A featured snippet is a result where Google shows a passage from a page first, above the page's title and link, usually at the top of the results, to answer the query directly. Google's systems choose the page automatically; there is no markup that requests it. Since 2020 a page shown as the snippet is not repeated lower down, and Search Console counts it as position one.