What is CTR (click-through rate) and how is it calculated?

CTR stands for click-through rate: out of every hundred times someone sees a link to your store, how many tap it. In SEO you read it in Search Console by query and by page; in advertising, Google Ads defines it as how often people who see your ad or your free product listing end up clicking, with the same formula.⁠^{[1]Google Ads Help. Clickthrough rate (CTR): Definition} It matters to a store because it separates two problems that look alike: not showing up and showing up without convincing. A product page with lots of impressions and few clicks does not need to climb in rankings; it needs a second look at what its result promises. And it is an easy number to get wrong, because it is a division and each of its two parts has its own rules.

How it is calculated

The formula is the same everywhere: clicks divided by impressions. If an ad gets 5 clicks on 100 impressions, its CTR is 5%, which is the example Google Ads gives.⁠^{[1]Google Ads Help. Clickthrough rate (CTR): Definition} Search Console defines it the same way, as clicks divided by impressions.⁠^{[2]Search Console Help. What are impressions, position, and clicks?} What changes from one tool to another is what counts as a click and what counts as an impression, and that is where the fine print lives.

What a click is. For Search Console, any click that takes the person to a page outside Google Search, Discover or News. Tapping a related search that keeps them inside Google does not count as a click.⁠^{[2]Search Console Help. What are impressions, position, and clicks?}

What an impression is. A search impression counts when someone has seen, or could have seen, a link to your site. As a rule, it is enough for the result to be on the results page that loaded, even if nobody scrolls down to it. In a carousel or a section that expands, though, the item usually has to be visible or opened with a click, and on infinite-scroll pages it has to actually come into view.⁠^{[2]Search Console Help. What are impressions, position, and clicks?} So a low CTR can be a result that few people ever saw, not just one that nobody wanted to tap.

How it is added up. Search Console groups the data in two ways. The chart adds by property: if two results from your site show up in the same search, they count as a single impression. The table adds by property when you group it by queries, countries, devices or dates, and by page when you group it by pages or by search appearance.⁠^{[3]Search Console Help. Performance report (Search results)} That is why the totals in the chart and the table do not always match, and why filtering by a page can raise the chart's clicks and impressions.⁠^{[4]Search Console Help. Performance report (Search results): Troubleshooting data discrepancies} The same site, over the same period, can give two different CTRs depending on how it is grouped, and both are correct.

Two more details move the number without anything changing in your store. Anonymized queries, the ones very few people make, do not appear in the table but do count in the chart's totals, and the table shows 1,000 rows at most.⁠^{[4]Search Console Help. Performance report (Search results): Troubleshooting data discrepancies} And data usually takes two to three days to arrive and is counted by day in Pacific time, so the latest day is almost never complete.⁠^{[4]Search Console Help. Performance report (Search results): Troubleshooting data discrepancies}

CTR with AI Overviews and AI Mode

Google's AI features have no CTR of their own in Search Console. Their clicks and impressions are inside total search traffic, in the "Web" search type of the performance report.⁠^{[5]Google Search Central. AI features and your website} The rules are the usual ones, with three clarifications. In AI Overviews, tapping a link to an external page counts as a click, and the whole summary takes up a single position: all its links get that same position. In AI Mode, tapping an external link also counts as a click. And if the person asks a follow-up question, it is a new query, and the impressions, positions and clicks of that answer are attributed to that new query.⁠^{[2]Search Console Help. What are impressions, position, and clicks?}

Since August 31, 2026 there is also a generative AI performance report for all sites, which pulls impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode out of that same web search type. It gives impressions only, by page, country, device and date: no clicks and no queries.⁠^{[6]Search Console Help. Generative AI performance report (Search)}

On whether AI takes clicks away, Google maintains two things. In August 2025 it said the total volume of organic clicks from Search had stayed relatively stable year over year, and in the same post it acknowledged that traffic is shifting: down on some sites, up on others.⁠^{[7]Google, official blog (Liz Reid, August 6, 2025). AI in Search is driving more queries and higher quality clicks} And its documentation states that clicks from results pages with AI Overviews are higher quality, because people spend more time on the site.⁠^{[5]Google Search Central. AI features and your website} Those are claims about Search as a whole. Your store's CTR is told only by your own Search Console.

In a store

A store wants to know the CTR of its backpacks on Google, and it has two product pages. This is a fictional example: the numbers are made up to show the most common calculation mistake.

The average of the two percentages, the third row, is wrong: it treats a page almost nobody sees the same as one that shows up twenty times more. The group's CTR is the last row: total clicks over total impressions, less than half of what the average says. The rule holds for any group: categories, countries, months or devices.

The second trap is mixing segments. Dividing the clicks of the last 28 days by the impressions of three months, or the clicks from mobile by the impressions from all devices, gives a number that describes no real result. Both numbers in the division have to come from the same filter.

How to check it

1. Fix the period and the segment before you look. Same dates, web search type and, if you filter, the same country and device for clicks and impressions. Leave out the last two or three days, which are usually incomplete.⁠^{[4]Search Console Help. Performance report (Search results): Troubleshooting data discrepancies}
2. For a group of product pages, export clicks and impressions and divide the totals. Do not copy the CTR column to average it.
3. Pick the grouping to fit the question. If you ask about a query, the table adds by property; if you ask about a page, it adds by page.⁠^{[3]Search Console Help. Performance report (Search results)} Clione, connected to Search Console with read-only access, shows the store's top queries and URLs and detects drops automatically.
4. Look at Google's AI separately. A page's impressions in the generative AI report and its clicks in the performance report, with the same dates, without dividing one by the other.⁠^{[6]Search Console Help. Generative AI performance report (Search)}⁠^{[5]Google Search Central. AI features and your website}
5. Do not compare organic CTR with your ads' CTR. Google Ads measures ads and free product listings, and Google warns that a good CTR depends on what you advertise and on which networks.⁠^{[1]Google Ads Help. Clickthrough rate (CTR): Definition}

Related concept: zero-click

A zero-click search is one that ends without the person tapping any result, for example because the answer was already on the Google page. It is a property of the search, not of your site. CTR measures something else: of the times you showed up, how many chose you. If your result appeared in a search that ends with no clicks, that search adds one impression to your denominator and no click to your numerator, which is why more zero-click searches lower your CTR even though your result has not changed. Which of the two is happening in your store shows up in impressions and clicks taken separately, not in the percentage.

To go further, the measurement and verification reading path orders the rest of the terms, and the entry on data drift explains why a product page can lose clicks without anyone having touched it on purpose.