What is click-through rate?
Click-through rate is the percentage of people who saw a link, ad, or citation and then clicked it, calculated as clicks divided by impressions.
It has always been used as a rough signal of relevance: a high click-through rate suggests the thing shown matched what the person wanted. That assumption carries over awkwardly to AI-generated answers, where the whole point is often to satisfy the question without requiring a click at all.
A low click-through rate on a citation inside an AI answer is not automatically a sign the content underperformed. It can just as easily mean the AI system did exactly what it was built to do, give the user a complete answer, and the source's content was good enough that no follow-up was needed. Judging AI-referred content by the same benchmarks used for search results risks penalizing it for the answer engine's own design.
Related
- Referral trafficReferral traffic is the set of visits to a site that arrive by following a link from another site or platform, identified by the referrer information the browser sends along.
- Zero-click searchA zero-click search is one where the user gets what they needed from the results page or an assistant's answer and never visits a website.
- CitationA citation is a source an AI assistant links or refers to in support of an answer it has given.
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