Brand search was 49.3% of clicks, and converted 16 times better
Your reporting mixes people searching for you with people searching for the problem you solve, and those two groups behave nothing alike.
Brand queries, across 50 spellings, produced 36,567 clicks from 115,914 impressions: a CTR of 31.55%. Everything else produced 37,593 clicks from 1,936,542 impressions, a CTR of 1.94%. Half the traffic came from people who already knew the name.
The split
Both halves are real traffic. They are not interchangeable, and averaging them produces a site-wide CTR that describes neither.
| Clicks | Impressions | CTR | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brand (50 spellings) | 36,567 (49.3%) | 115,914 | 31.55% |
| Non-brand | 37,593 | 1,936,542 | 1.94% |
Why this distorts everything else you measure
Brand queries sit at the top of the results page and are clicked by people who typed your name on purpose. Leave them in your CTR-by-position table and the top bands look extraordinary. Leave them in your conversion reporting and every acquisition channel looks better than it is, because the people converting were already yours.
A name is a distribution channel, and it can be taken
Half the clicks arriving through a string of characters means the string is an asset. It is also the one asset with no legal protection by default: a stranger registering a similar name can take a share of that traffic, and the only defence is having chosen a name that is hard to collide with in the first place.
What to do with your own export
Tag every query containing your name or a plausible misspelling of it, then report the two halves separately and permanently. The non-brand half is the only one that measures whether your search work is doing anything.
Cite this
Mailarpawar, P. (2026). Brand search was 49.3% of clicks, and converted 16 times better. RankHonestly. Measured on 267 days of Google Search Console data. https://rankhonestly.com/case-study/brand-search
These figures are free to quote, republish and chart, with a link back.
Use the numbers
More from the same dataset
- CTR by Google position, measured on one site instead of averaged across many
- The first 90 days of a new site, month by month, with the work shipped beside it
The whole record
This page is one table out of it. The book is all of it, for $19 once. What is in the book, or read Chapter 4, free to read.