September 4th, 2006 by metapilot

You may have read recently (August 2006) that AOL inadvertently released information about searches done through the AOL site. SEO Scoop discovered a forum post detailing the click through rate for ranking #1 vs. #2-#10. While AOL users, as a group, do tend to be less web savvy than the average web user, the sample size is large enough that we can now make more educated guesses about the way people use search engines.
Results from:
Total Searches:9,038,794
Total Clicks: 4,926,623

In the above sample of 4,926,623 clicks,
2,075,765 of the clicks (42.1%) were on the #1 ranked result.;
586,100 of the clicks (11.9%) were on the #2 ranked result (3.5 x fewer clicks than the #1 position);
418,643 of the clicks (8.5%) were on the #3 ranked result (1.4 x fewer clicks than the #2 position):
298,532 of the clicks (6.1%) were on the #4 ranked result (1.4 x fewer clicks than the #3 position)
242,169 of the clicks (4.9%) were on the #5 ranked result (1.2 x fewer clicks than the #4 position)
199,541 of the clicks (4.1%) were on the #6 ranked result (1.2 x fewer clicks than the #5 position)
168,080 of the clicks (3.4%) were on the #7 ranked result (1.2 x fewer clicks than the #6 position)
148,489 of the clicks (3.0%) were on the #8 ranked result (1.1 x fewer clicks than the #7 position)
140,356 of the clicks (2.8%) were on the #9 ranked result (1.05 x fewer clicks than the #8 position)
147,551 of the clicks (3.0%) were on the #10 ranked result (1.05 x more clicks than the #9 position)