Organic CTR Curve
The observed pattern in which average click-through rate falls steeply from the first organic result to the tenth and collapses beyond the first page.
Analogy Mental model
A medal ceremony. Everyone remembers the winner, some remember second and third, and the person who came eighth is a stranger even to his own relatives.
In practice What you actually do
Keep the working benchmarks in mind for non-branded queries without heavy result-page features: roughly a quarter to a third of clicks at the top, falling by half or more at each step, with the bottom of the first page retaining only a percent or two. Use it to explain why a page one ranking is not the same as traffic.
Where people get burned Pitfalls
Where AI overviews, several top ads, and a map pack occupy the screen, the first organic result may capture only a fraction of the conventional figure. Any traffic forecast that ignores the layout is a forecast that will be wrong.
This entry was written in English from the Chinese original, not machine-translated. Read the Chinese version →