What Each Google Position Is Actually Worth: Click-Through Data from 1.5 Million Australian Searches

Everyone in marketing quotes click-through-rate (CTR) statistics — “position one gets a third of all clicks”, that sort of thing. The problem is that most of those numbers come from studies that are years old, based on US data, and may not reflect how Australians actually click in 2026, on a results page now crowded with ads, map packs and AI answers.

So we ran our own. We pulled 16 months of Google Search Console data across 13 Australian businesses we work with — spanning trades, ecommerce, health, professional services and local retail — and measured the real click-through rate at each position. The dataset:

• 13 Australian businesses
• 11,181 unique search queries
• 1,558,584 impressions (times a result was shown)
• 38,396 clicks

Here’s what the real numbers say.

Click-through rate by Google position

Google position	Average CTR
#1	17.2%
#2–3	7.1%
#4–5	5.6%
#6–10 (rest of page 1)	2.2%
Page 2 (11–20)	0.7%
Page 3+ (21+)	0.3%

A few things jump out.

Position 1 is in a league of its own

The top organic spot earned 17.2% of clicks — more than double the rate of positions 2 and 3, and roughly eight times the rate of the bottom of page one. The gap between first and second place is enormous. In a results page increasingly dominated by ads and AI answers, that single top organic position is more valuable than ever.

Page one takes essentially everything

Across all 38,396 clicks in the dataset, over 90% went to page one. Everything from position 11 onwards — pages two, three and beyond — shared the remaining 9% between them. The old joke holds: the best place to hide a body is page two of Google, because no one ever goes there.

Half of all visibility is wasted

Here’s the stat that should bother every business owner. Nearly half of all the impressions in our dataset — every time these businesses appeared in Google — happened on page two or beyond, where the combined click-through rate is under 1%. That’s a vast amount of “visibility” earning almost nothing. Being on Google isn’t the goal. Being near the top of Google is.

The middle of page one is a real opportunity

Positions 4–10 get meaningful impressions but convert them to clicks at a fraction of the top three’s rate. That’s the “striking distance” zone — the pages that are almost there. Moving a page from the bottom of page one into the top three doesn’t add a few percent; based on this data it can multiply its clicks several times over. It’s usually the highest-ROI work in SEO, because the hard part (getting onto page one at all) is already done.

What this means for your business

• “We’re on Google” means very little. If you’re on page two for the searches that matter, you’re effectively invisible. The entire game is fighting for the top of page one.
• The top three positions are where the money is. If a high-intent search that leads to sales for you is sitting at position 6, getting it to position 2 isn’t a marginal gain — it could several-times your clicks from that term.
• Don’t be seduced by impressions. A report showing rising impressions while clicks stay flat usually means you’re gaining visibility on page two — which, as the data shows, is close to worthless. Watch clicks and position, not impressions.

An honest note on the data

A few caveats, because we’d rather you trust the numbers than oversell them. Search Console reports average position for each query, so the per-position figures are directional rather than laboratory-precise — which is why we’ve grouped them into ranges rather than implying false precision. The sample is 13 small-to-mid Australian businesses, so a giant brand’s curve would look different. And CTR always varies by search intent — a branded search behaves nothing like a generic one. But the overall shape is robust and consistent with what we see across every account: a steep cliff after the top few positions, and a near-dead zone beyond page one.

The takeaway

Getting onto page one is the entry fee. Getting into the top three is where the clicks — and the customers — actually are. If the searches that matter most to your business are sitting in that page-one “almost there” zone, that’s exactly where focused SEO pays off fastest.

Curious where your important searches currently sit? Book a free strategy call and we’ll show you which ones are within striking distance of the top.