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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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 page into this spot will make you a lot more visible and improve your CTR, even if the snippet isn’t quite perfect. If you’re not already working towards the snippets, it’s a good time to start.
Being in this position usually requires good content formatting. It may also require optimized schemas and other additional factors, but getting the snippet position is often more important than being in the #1 organic position.
Conclusion
The state of Google’s results is still evolving, but the primary takeaways here are that the key to good traffic is in maintaining high rankings for your content and optimizing for featured snippets. Ads can work, but organic content still tends to get more clicks, and being in the top positions is critical. The best future-proofing for your content is to focus on producing high-quality, relevant information and keeping up with changes in search trends and algorithms.