Google Desktop CTR Rises as Mobile Declines, Report Finds

Click-through rates across devices are heading in starkly different directions, according to fresh data from Advanced Web Ranking. While mobile CTR continues to slip, desktop performance is showing surprising resilience, challenging the prevailing narrative of organic search decline.

This divergence is particularly notable because recent reports have broadly documented a drop in organic clicks, driven largely by the expansion of AI Overviews in Google’s search results. Previous analyses using AWR’s data, alongside figures from Ahrefs and Seer Interactive, have consistently shown that erosion. But the latest first-quarter data for desktop tells a different story.

The findings come from AWR’s CTR tracking tool, which measures dataset-specific movement rather than direct algorithmic changes. Across 22 industries, top desktop click-through rates generally improved over two quarters, while mobile CTR fell at the number-one position.

Desktop gains were concentrated below the third ranking position, while the top mobile spot dropped by 2.20 percentage points, with other positions in the top ten remaining relatively stable. The pattern holds for both branded and unbranded search queries, though branded desktop gains were more pronounced. Desktop branded searches improved across all top-ten positions, with increases ranging from 1.99 to 5.78 percentage points. Mobile branded changes were mostly minor. For unbranded queries, the number-one mobile position saw a 3.07-point CTR drop, while desktop positions gained.

AWR also breaks the data down by keyword length and industry. The desktop-mobile split held broadly across all 22 industries measured, though some single-position swings were dramatic. The largest desktop increase was a 7.05-percentage point gain for first-ranked sites in Family & Parenting. The largest mobile decline was a 9.03-point drop for first-ranked sites in Law, Government, & Politics.

It’s important to understand how AWR presents these figures. The company often releases combined totals that sum per-position gains across the top ten. Those aggregated numbers describe cumulative change, not what happened to a single site. When discussing first-ranked sites in a position-by-position breakdown, the figures map directly to specific ranking placements.

The broader context is a recent string of CTR data pointing downward, alongside the growing presence of AI Overviews on the SERP. Ahrefs found a 58% drop in CTR for the position-one result on queries with an AI Overview. Seer Interactive measured similar declines, and Pew Research reported that users who saw an AI summary clicked on traditional links less often.

But desktop gains don’t simply cancel out months of mobile softness. Looking at AWR’s Q1 data, it’s tempting to see this as part of a recovery signal emerging elsewhere. In an April report, Seer noted that CTRs for organic queries with AI Overviews on the SERP were rebounding sharply from mid-December lows. AWR now adds a desktop-versus-mobile layer to that recovery signal. The difference is that Seer’s work isolates AI Overview queries, while AWR does not.

In AWR’s report, they track CTR benchmarks across different SERP positions, regardless of whether the SERP includes AI Overviews. Desktop CTR rates rose across positions during the quarter, while mobile was weaker at the top. Neither AWR nor Seer explicitly assigns causation to the movement, whether due to AI Overviews or changing ad layouts.

This makes it increasingly important to consider how your CTR varies across devices. In the past, the gap between desktop and mobile wasn’t wide enough to worry about using one as a proxy for the other. Now, relying on single-device benchmarks or blended estimates risks overstating mobile performance and understating desktop results.

Modeling forward traffic from last month’s impressions and your desktop CTR curve works well when SERPs stay static, with no AI Overviews, Product ads, Featured snippets, or other elements above the organic results. As search results change with device, intent, and features above organic results, the original curve becomes less reliable.