The CTR of Ads Versus Organic Content in 2024 (and Beyond)

Running a website requires bringing in traffic, and there are two ways to do that. You can earn organic traffic, or you can pay for traffic via ads. Google is the supreme arbiter of both (at least until the results of this whole antitrust thing shake out), so it's important to look at Google's results page to estimate how your performance may be, now and in the future.

A Glimpse at the Data

First, let's take a look at a summary of average data for 2024 and how it compares to similar data from 2023. I'm pulling this mostly from an excellent report created by First Page Sage and drawing my own conclusions.

The common wisdom is that being in position #1 in the Google organic search results is absolutely critical, as that position gets by far the most clicks. This seems to remain true:

• Position 1: 39.8%
• Position 2: 18.7%
• Position 3: 10.2%
• Position 4: 7.2%
• Position 5: 5.1%

Positions below #5 all have lower and lower percentages of click-through traffic, down to 1.6% for position #10 if position #10 exists.

That brings me to one comment: Google was trying out an infinite scroll search results page for a while, presumably to offset the fact that most people don't click through to page two, regardless. I don't recall exactly when they changed it back, but it clearly didn't work. Position 11, whether it's on page 2 or just down further, is still getting lower clicks than those above it.

One of the biggest fears of marketers is that Google saturating the search results with paid ad responses – at the top of the search results page, specifically – takes traffic away from the organic results. That's probably true, but the situation isn't as dire as you might think.

• Ad position 1: 2.1%
• Ad position 2: 1.4%
• Ad position 3: 1.3%
• Ad position 4: 1.2%

The click-through rate for even the best ads is on par with organic position #8.

Why is this? It's unclear, but there are some assumptions you can make. For one thing, an increasing number of people are running some form of ad blocker, so for a sizable proportion of the internet-using audience, those search ads simply don't appear. Can't click through ads you can't see, right?

Another reason is the broad distrust of advertising. It's not quite banner blindness since the search ads are nearly identical to organic results, but at this point, a lot of people are used to assuming the search ads are going to be too commercial to answer their questions, so they'll scroll past them.

One interesting point of data is another one that runs counter to common wisdom. When Google introduced their featured snippets feature, bloggers in general thought they were a bad thing. After all, if a search user can have their question answered on the Google search results page, and they don't need to click through, that hurts the sites that lose that traffic, right?

As it turns out, typical blog content formatting and Google's careful choices have meant that the featured snippets are less like complete answers and more like teasers. If you ask for a specific piece of data, Google will likely give it to you, but the context behind it requires clicking through.

As such, the first featured snippet is actually more valuable than position #1 results, at 42.9% CTR; the second snippet is lower, at 27.4% CTR, but that clocks in higher than organic position #2 (but lower than organic #1).

It seems fears over Google siphoning away traffic have been largely unfounded. At this point, featured snippets are a powerful boost to the sites that can earn them. The people most hurt by a featured snippet are the people in result position 10, which can be bumped to page two instead, but frankly, if you're not in the top 3-5 positions in search, you might as well not be in search at all.

Other interesting information, in no particular order:

• Image results can get as much as a 4.9% CTR, though images devoid of context often don't have much to compel a user to click.
• Video results can have as much as a 6.4% CTR. In my experience, Google's choice of when a video is relevant largely comes down to when there's little in the way of non-video results for the topic.
• The "people also ask" questions box gets a meager 3% CTR. Given how often it has algorithmic questions that don't make sense, this is almost higher than I'd have thought.
• The knowledge graph/knowledge pane sidebar gets only 1.4% CTR, which makes sense since it's the one that is either irrelevant or directly answers a query.
• In the local services box, the pack positions are all on par with each other and share around a 15% CTR. #1 has a slight boost at 17%, but that's not a huge gap.

All of this combines to give a pretty interesting picture of what the state of the Google search results page is doing.

A Look to the Future

To glimpse the future, you need to view the past. Where are these numbers trending?

For the most part, they've been roughly stable. There have been small trends:

• Position #1 CTR increased from 39.6% to 39.8% from 2023 to 2024.
• Position #2 CTR increased from 18.4% to 18.7% from 2023 to 2024.
• Paid ads in the top three positions decreased from 1.7% to 1.6% on average.

All of this generally means that organic results are being trusted slightly more than paid search results, but the changes are overall pretty minimal.

One thing worth mentioning here is the Gemini AI summaries. Personally, I have yet to encounter these using a desktop web browser, only on mobile. So far, the data isn't clear, but it seems to have minimal impact on the click-through rates for both organic and paid search results. That indicates that people aren't really trusting the AI summaries or using them to view search results. It's just one more box Google has put in the way of what you really want to see.

It's entirely possible that these AI search results will become more impactful over time. On the other hand, the immense expense of AI, the lack of incoming funding, and the fact that most people don't like or care about it are all combining to indicate an impending bubble burst pretty soon. I'm sure Google, Microsoft, and a few other big players are going to keep at it for a while, but the writing seems to be on the wall.

Key Takeaways

Now that we have the data and some idea of where it's headed in the future, we can come up with some of the more tangible takeaways that will be useful for bloggers and content marketers.

Google's AI Results Still Aren't Trusted

While Google is certainly going to keep pushing its generative AI summaries, there's no real evidence that they're any better than the existing knowledge graph. Combine that with the initial issues with hallucinations and pulling information from jokes and presenting it as fact, and you have a chunk of the search results dedicated to something people just aren't trusting or using.

Will this change? Maybe. My personal, unfounded suspicion is that Google will be using AI more and more in the background, where it isn't visible. If the knowledge graph is vetted and generated by AI rather than just an AI summary of other content, who would know? If AI is rolled into the overall search ranking algorithm, it'd be just one more out of hundreds of factors. It really doesn't change much versus a featured snippet beyond often making the information a user wants to see a little less visible.

One interesting fact is that, in a survey from the end of 2023, nearly half of the world's top news websites were blocking AI crawlers. This makes it a lot harder for these AI services to legitimately provide updated and relevant information and, critically, serves as a foundation to prove illegal scraping if that information is later found in the AI databases.

So, takeaway #1: don't stress too much about the AI, at least in terms of search results. The impact generative AI has on content production and on freelancing is much stronger and more worth worrying about instead.

Getting in the Knowledge Graph is Overhyped

For a while, people assumed that getting a key spot in the knowledge graph was a huge boost. At this point, the knowledge graph is mostly just a way to embed data from sites like IMDB, Wikipedia, and other informational databases.

Image source: https://www.seobility.net/en/wiki/Google_Knowledge_Graph

The knowledge graph doesn't even show up for more of the common blogger queries you might see. You probably won't get in it, but also, it doesn't matter.

Image and Video Results are a Nice Boost

While a 5% or so CTR isn't a lot, having your image or video show up in results is a nice boost when you might otherwise not be able to compete for a query. For future content marketing, it might not be a bad idea to make video versions and infographic-style images for key information, especially if there isn't much competition in the video space for a topic.

Look at it this way: in a competitive topic well-covered by blog posts, your post might not even make the top 10 results. But, if you produce a video on it when few other people have done so, you can siphon off that 3-5% CTR, where you normally wouldn't get anything.

The biggest downside is that Google's video results are usually pulled from YouTube or, sometimes, another video hosting site. They aren't pulling a video embedded on your page. Therefore, you need to optimize a YouTube profile to funnel people to your site.

Featured Snippets are Extremely Valuable

Featured snippets are better even than the #1 organic space. Getting your content in the featured snippet means having a tight alignment between topic, query, and user intent, something I've covered a lot in the past.

If you take any single takeaway from this post, let it be this: building your content to suit the specific needs and questions your readers have is critical. Google's featured snippets are all about finding that narrow intersection and providing the paragraph or two from a page that meets it. You need to proactively be the one to identify that intersection and provide that content as bait for Google to display.

Paid Search Ads are Useful but Not Required

Paid ads are not as disruptive or as prominent as you might expect from the fact that Google slaps as many as four of them on top of a page before organic results get a chance to be seen. From ad blockers to distrust in advertising to a poor alignment of PPC ad copy and organic queries, they rarely get more than a 2% CTR. This isn't necessarily nothing, but you really need to be confident in making sure your ads are compelling, and you get a decent rate of return on your investment.

One note here is that there's not much variation in CTR between the different ad positions. This means that if you can save a bunch of your budget by aiming for position 2 or 3 in the ad auction rather than forcing position 1, you can do so and not lose out on a ton of traffic.

Local Pack Results are Mostly Equal

Finally, it's worth mentioning local search results as well. Google's map and local pack results also have ads that don't matter much, but the local pack results are also interesting in that they tend to have roughly similar CTRs.

Users want to see the options and evaluate them on their own. Ranking doesn't change this calculus all that much.

Blogging in 2024 and Beyond

From my position as a content marketer, it's been a very interesting last year or two. It's a lot of "the more things change, the more they stay the same." Human nature is to constantly seek innovation, but so many of these innovations are just different routes to the same end results.

What it all amounts to is that your goal, as ever, is to be in the top three organic search results. The AI doesn't matter, and the ads don't matter; it's all a distraction from the core: write great, relevant, useful content, make sure your content aligns with user search intent, and keep the ball rolling. That's how you succeed, regardless of what other market pressures are doing.