Robert_Charlton - 7:09 am on Jun 5, 2009 (gmt 0)

From this discussion...

First page of search results!
Do people always click on the first result?
[webmasterworld.com...]

...here's the AOL data in another form, describing behaviors broken down by percentage of clicks for each position, etc....

...46.38% of searchers did not click on ANY result. 48.16% clicked on some result on the first page. The remaining 5.46% clicked a link on page 2 or higher. The 1st page clicks were split up as follows: 22.73%...1st position 6.40%....2 4.53%....3 3.24%....4 2.61%....5 2.14%....6 1.81%....7 1.60%....8 1.51%....9 1.59%....10 Interesting that 10th is better than 9th, but not too surprising.

Presence of ads and Universal results, wording of titles and descriptions, and the query itself would all affect click-throughs.

I've also seen theoretical discussions that assume that Zipf's Law [en.wikipedia.org] would apply.