How does your last weeks Click-Through Rate compare with your last 16 month rate?

[MichaelCorfman]

Google search console provides information on the total number of impressions for a site and the total number of clicks.

For example, for the GPWA website over the last 16 months, Google reports 11.8 million impressions and 74.3 thousand clicks, for an average Click-Through Rate (CTR) of 0.6%. However, if I look at the same information for the past week Google reports 263 thousand impressions and 787 clicks, for an average CTR of 0.3%.

So, the GPWA website CTR has dropped in half across all search terms. Of course, that is a very broad measure with lots of impressions being way down on the list of search results. In fact, the average position is 36.2 in the past 16 months and 42.1 in the past week.

I looked at CTR changes after reading the following article published on Search Engine Land:

The Great Decoupling of search and the birth of the agentic web

I found the entire article, and how the world and Google search has evolved based on marketplace pressures and AI to be fascinating.

Just one observation from the article: it used to be that position 1 in search results delivered an average of 28% of the clicks. Today, the CTR for the top organic position has plummeted to less than 10% when an AI Overview appears.

So, for this week's poll I ask how your CTR has changed, based on looking at the CTR for your site over the past week as compared with the past 16 months.

Besides voting in the poll, I invite you to share some numbers for the CTR changes you have seen on different sites in a post.

Also, it can be interesting to look at how CTR has changed for different search terms. For example, the a search for "GPWA" can be expected to produce a high CTR for the GPWA website, which it does, and that CTR is over 40%. I guess if someone was searching for GPWA because they wanted the German Professional Women's Association, Georgia Prison Wardens Association, Gramercy Park Wealth, GPW and Associates Advisors, they would not click on the Gambling Portal Webmasters Association search result. And for GPWA, the CTR has not changed much, but that's almost certainly due to the fact Google does not currently present an AI Overview for that search term.

Michael

[thedepositbonus]

I am seeing continous drop in search ctr and been webmaster for 20 years, after AI everything went down rapidly....

[ocreditor]

CTR dropped approximately in half

[eenzoo]

Brand searches deliver quite ok CTR for me, but generic search terms dropped more than 50%
... with Google's zero-click-policy it will develope even worse, teaching users not to leave the "result pages"

[gabornagy]

CTR is definitely down for me as well. Despite some recovery after the latest update, reaching the levels seen before AI Overviews no longer looks realistic.