The median Google Ads advertiser is seeing a 4.64% click-through rate, up 8.62% year-over-year. That’s the honest answer, and if you stop reading here, you now know more than most of the “2–6% is normal” advice floating around.

But that single number is not helpful for judging your own account because it blends Search with Display, a five-person landscaping company with a global SaaS brand, and Style & Fashion with Health & Fitness.

The more useful finding in Optmyzr’s Q2 2026 Benchmark Report (which is the source for the CTR number mentioned above) isn’t the 4.64%. It’s that no single CTR benchmark holds up across account size, campaign type, and vertical, and treating one as the truth will send you chasing a number that was never built for your account in the first place.

Here’s how that plays out across the segments that actually matter:

Source: Optmyzr Q2 2026 Benchmark Report. Absolute figures are Q2 2026 medians of per-account values; YoY changes are the median per-account percentage change, Q2 2025 to Q2 2026.

Download the report here.

Your account size changes what “good” means

SMB advertisers post a median CTR of 5.10%. Enterprise advertisers post 2.43%, which is less than half of what we saw for SMBs. That gap isn’t a performance verdict. Smaller accounts tend to run tighter, more literal keyword sets and simpler ad groups, which naturally land more impressions in front of people who are ready to click, while enterprise accounts run broader, brand-heavy campaigns across more surfaces, which spreads CTR thinner even when the underlying business is healthy.

But here’s the twist worth noticing from the report: Enterprise CTR grew faster year-over-year (up 15.75%) than SMB’s (up 7.76%), even from that much lower base. Enterprise advertisers are closing the engagement gap without closing the absolute one. If you manage an enterprise account and benchmark against a 5% figure pulled from an SMB-skewed blog post, you’ll conclude something is broken when it probably isn’t.

Campaign type still matters more than account size

Inside the same account, CTR varies by an order of magnitude depending on what the campaign is built to do. Search campaigns average 8.88%, because they show up in response to someone actively typing a query. Local Services campaigns run hotter still, at 11.63%, because they surface for people searching with immediate, local intent, like “plumber near me.” When you compare either of those to a Display or Performance Max line item in the same account, the CTR will look weak by comparison. But it actually isn’t. It’s just a different mechanism serving a different job.

Is rising CTR real engagement, or a shrinking pool of impressions?

CTR climbing 8.62% while CVR crept up a comparatively modest 3.59% is the detail worth sitting with. There are two explanations that exist for that, and they’re not mutually exclusive.

The optimistic read is that ads earned more clicks because they got better. The more interesting read, and the one the report leans toward, is that “AI Overviews are compressing paid inventory,” in the words of Optmyzr CEO, Frederick Vallaeys, leaving advertisers paying more per click “for ads that earn higher engagement.” There’s simply less inventory to bid into, and what’s left skews toward higher-intent queries.

Fred makes a related point in his book, The AI-Amplified Marketer: when Microsoft Ads saw CTR rise inside its Copilot experience, it wasn’t because ads got more compelling. The reason was that a smaller, more qualified set of impressions was shown to begin with, so the ones that did show converted attention into clicks at a higher rate. Fewer impressions led to more concentrated intent which led to a higher CTR. Whether that’s what’s happening here at scale is a reasonable read of the data, but it’s not a settled fact.

Mike Rhodes, founder of Ads2AI.com, adds the skeptic’s caution worth keeping in view: these are median, platform-reported numbers, and “attributed ROAS isn’t incremental revenue.” A median can hide a wide spread of winners and losers cancelling each other out. That’s one more reason a single CTR figure, even a well-sourced one, isn’t a target to hit. It’s only a reference point to sanity-check against your numbers.

Vertical swings make a universal number even less useful

Style & Fashion’s CTR grew 18.96% year-over-year, the largest jump of any published vertical, while Health & Fitness moved a modest 2.04%. Both are real businesses selling real products, and both would be poorly served by the same benchmark. The likely reason is that Style & Fashion runs on visual discovery and impulse-driven clicks, while Health & Fitness tends toward more considered, research-heavy searches. A vertical-blind benchmark flattens that difference into meaninglessness.

So what to actually do with these numbers?

You should not compare your account to 4.64%. But you should instead compare it to advertisers your size, running your campaign types, in your vertical, and then track your own trend quarter over quarter. A Local Services account sitting at 9% CTR isn’t underperforming a “good” benchmark of 11.63%; it’s worth investigating why, but only against the right peer group.