As 2024 is behind us it is important to look back at some important metrics that can help us to improve our SEO strategy in 2025.
Google still holds a significant part of search queries
Google still holds a significant part of search queries with almost 89.76% but there is a slight drop compared to previous year. Bing has 3.96% which is an increase compared to previous year, Yandex is in third place with 2.56%, Yahoo holds 1.29%, Baidu 0.81% and privacy focused DuckDuckGo 0.66%. Slight drop off in Google dominance has been distributed evenly toward other search engines by data from Statcounter.
The first position in Google rankings gets 39.8% of all clicks
Over the past year, Google has increasingly integrated generative AI overviews into search results, providing users with more comprehensive snippets. These AI-generated summaries appear most frequently in general information searches, showing up on approximately 31% of search results pages. While there were initial concerns about their effect on clickthrough rates, Google began linking to sources within AI overviews in September 2024. Although adoption was slow at first, by January 2025, these links achieved CTRs comparable to the top three to five organic results by data from Firstpagesage.
Notably, the presence of AI overviews has had minimal impact on organic result CTRs, which remain strong, whereas ad clicks have seen a significant decline.
Heading into 2025, searchers appear to trust the highest-ranking organic results slightly more than the previous year, with CTRs rising from 39.6% to 39.8% for Position 1 and from 18.4% to 18.7% for Position 2. In contrast, Paid Search has been more affected, with the average CTR for the top three positions dropping from 1.7% to 1.5% due to AI overviews. Meanwhile, local search CTRs have remained steady.
On average, a Google top 10 result contains 1,447 words by data from Backlinko
Google is still king when it comes to usage
According to SimilarWeb Google had 83.3 billion visits in December 2024. Most visits are from Google Search but also from other services like Google Maps, Gmail, Google News, and Google Shopping.
Google’s algorithm that determines the ranking of websites has over 200 factors according to Backlinko
Top factors that influence the most are quality content, backlinks, technical SEO (page speed, mobile-friendliness, crawlability), keyword optimization, user experience and schema markup.
Average time to see impact of links on search rankings is 3.1 months by Authorityhacker research
When it comes to link building patience is the key in order to see results. Focus on quality not quantity.
When looking on Google search results top three positions get 67.09% of all clicks by data from Advancedwebranking
This data shows that a huge number of clicks go to the first three search results with 46,27% for the first search result.
Most traffic worldwide comes from mobile devices, shows data from Statista
Looking at the chart below we can see that the percentage has been increasing since Q2 2023 when it was 53.42% and in Q4 2024 that number was 62.54%.
Peculiar article, totally what I was looking for.