Why your CTR curve matters more than an industry average
You will often see figures such as "position one gets 30% of clicks". In practice CTR varies enormously. A brand query, a local search with a map pack, a shopping query full of product listing ads and an informational query answered by an AI Overview behave completely differently, even at the same position.
Building the curve from your own Search Console data turns CTR into something you can act on. A query at position 3 earning 2% CTR might look poor against a generic benchmark, yet be perfectly normal for your market. Another at 6% might be well below what your similar pages achieve.
The impact of AI Overviews on CTR
AI Overviews and other answer features sit above the organic results for many informational searches, and when they fully answer the question fewer people click through. Comparing those queries against standard queries would flag them unfairly, so the tool benchmarks each group separately. That lets you spot genuine snippet problems rather than features you cannot control.
How to lift CTR without changing rankings
- Match the searcher’s language in the title, using the terms the query itself uses.
- Add specifics: prices, numbers, timeframes, locations or the current year where accurate.
- Lead with the benefit, and put the brand name at the end.
- Write meta descriptions as ad copy, even though Google sometimes rewrites them.
- Preview before publishing with the SERP Snippet Preview Tool so nothing important is truncated.