Click-Through Rate Benchmarks by Industry and Channel (2026)

What is a good click-through rate?

It depends on where the link sits. In the latest data, the #1 organic Google result is clicked on 19.35% of desktop impressions, a Google search ad on 6.64%, a Facebook traffic ad on 1.93% and a display ad on 0.46%. Mailchimp users get a click on 2.62% of delivered emails. That is a 40-fold spread from the top placement to the bottom.

So a "good" CTR only means something next to the benchmark for the same channel, placement and industry. A 2% CTR would be poor for a search ad and strong for a Facebook ad. Every benchmark below is a median or an average across thousands of campaigns or millions of impressions, so the spread around it is wide.

What is the average CTR for Google Ads?

The average click-through rate for Google search ads is 6.64%, according to WordStream by LocaliQ's 2026 benchmarks. That figure is the median of 13,474 U.S. search campaigns on Google Ads and Microsoft Ads that ran from April 2025 to March 2026. A year earlier the same report gave 6.66%, so paid search CTR held steady.

Industry matters more than the year. Arts and entertainment ads get 12.75%, nearly twice the all-industry figure. Finance and insurance (9.83%) and travel (9.32%) come next. At the bottom, auto repair and parts gets 5.56% and dentists 5.66%. Even the lowest industry stays above 5%.

Display ads are a different channel. WordStream's last published display benchmark, from 2017–18, put the Google Display Network at 0.46%, against 3.17% for search ads in the same sample. That is about 7 times lower. Display ads are seen in passing, while search ads answer a query someone just typed.

What is a good CTR for Facebook ads?

Facebook traffic campaigns averaged a 1.93% CTR in WordStream by LocaliQ's 2026 benchmarks, up from 1.71% the year before. The data covers 1,892 U.S. campaigns from April 2025 to June 2026. Beauty and personal care led at 2.73%, and finance and insurance was lowest at 1.46%.

In every one of the 22 industries both reports cover, search ads out-click Facebook ads, by 3.95 points (health and fitness) up to 10.04 points (arts and entertainment). Lead-generation campaigns on Facebook, a separate objective, averaged 2.70%.

What is the click-through rate of the first result on Google?

The #1 organic result on Google gets a 19.35% CTR on desktop, in Advanced Web Ranking's data for September 2026 on results pages with no AI Overview. That is 3.4 times the 5.76% earned by position 2. Position 3 gets 2.56%, and by position 5 the rate is below 1% (0.91%).

Intent shifts the curve more than anything else. For navigational searches, when people look for a specific site, the #1 result gets 36.94%. For informational searches it gets 5.72%. People asking a question often get the answer on the results page and never click.

Do AI Overviews reduce clicks?

Yes. Every study we found shows fewer clicks when Google adds an AI summary, though estimates of the size range from 24% to 61%. Pew Research Center tracked the browsing of 900 U.S. adults in March 2025. Users clicked a search result on 8% of visits to pages with an AI summary, against 15% of visits without one. They clicked a link inside the summary on just 1% of visits.

The vendor studies measure different things. Seer Interactive found organic CTR on AI Overview queries fell 61% from June 2024 to September 2025. Ahrefs estimated that an AI Overview cut the #1 result's CTR by 58% in December 2025. Advanced Web Ranking's September 2026 data shows a smaller gap at #1: 14.78% with an AI Overview vs. 19.35% without, about 24%.

Part of the gap was there before AI Overviews. Seer notes that queries which trigger AI Overviews already had lower CTRs before the feature launched, because they are mostly informational questions. Paid ads were hit too. On the queries Seer tracked, paid CTR fell from 19.70% to 6.34% where an AI Overview appeared.

What is a good email click rate?

Across all Mailchimp users, the average email click rate is 2.62%, meaning about 1 in 38 delivered emails gets a click. Nonprofits lead the industries Mailchimp publishes at 3.27%, followed by education and training (3.02%) and business and finance (2.78%). Ecommerce trails at 1.74%.

Mailchimp measures unique clicks per delivered email and only counts campaigns sent to at least 1,000 subscribers. Its public page was last updated in December 2023 and says in-app benchmarks may differ.

Methodology & caveats

This graphic started from CXL's guide "What is a 'Good' Click-Through Rate?". Its charts are 2016–17 screenshots from sources that are now offline, and its industry table sets 2017–18 WordStream display figures beside newer search figures. We traced each topic to the publisher that owns the data and used that publisher's latest release. Every figure was checked on the publisher's page on November 7, 2026.

Paid search and Facebook figures are WordStream by LocaliQ medians, which the reports call "averages", for U.S. campaigns of WordStream and LocaliQ clients. Client campaigns are managed and optimized, so they may run above the market as a whole. WordStream says as much about its stable 2026 CTRs. Industry names are shortened. Where WordStream's table and text disagree (Travel: 9.32% vs. 9.82%), we use the table.

Organic CTR by position is clicks divided by impressions per position, computed by data.co from the counts in Advanced Web Ranking's CTR study, desktop, September 2026. AWR's sample is international. "Standard results" means results pages without an AI Overview. AWR reports several other cuts (mobile, by industry, by SERP feature) that are not shown here.

The AI Overview estimates are not directly comparable. Pew measures whether a visit ended in any result click. Seer compares the same informational queries over time. Ahrefs compares AI Overview keywords against a forecast based on keywords without one. AWR compares pages with and without an AI Overview in the same month. The Pew (46.7%) and AWR (23.6%) reductions are derived by data.co. So are the 3.4× and ~7× ratios and the search-minus-Facebook gaps.

The hero chart puts rates from different studies, periods and definitions side by side to show scale, not to rank channels precisely. The display ad rate is from 2017–18 because no data owner has published a newer one, and the email rate is as of December 2023. Each panel's 1,000 cells are filled to the nearest whole cell.