Branded vs non-branded search statistics at a glance
| Category | Statistic | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Share | Just over 44% of US Google searches are for branded terms | SparkToro / Datos, December 2024 |
| Share | Navigational intent accounts for about 33% of all Google searches; informational is about 50% | SparkToro / Datos, 2024 |
| Share | 77.7% of the volume in Google's 100 most-searched US keywords goes to branded queries | Computed from Ahrefs, September 2026 |
| Share | 72 of those 100 keywords name a company, product, app, site or organisation | Computed from Ahrefs, 2026 |
| Share | Google's own brands take 25.1% of the branded volume in that top 100 | Computed from Ahrefs, 2026 |
| Clicks | Branded paid search CTR is 22.21% against 3.60% for non-brand in B2B SaaS, a 6.2x gap | PipeRocket, August 2026 |
| Cost | A branded click costs $3.12; a non-branded click costs $13.75 | PipeRocket, 2026 |
| Cost | A branded lead costs $34; a non-branded lead costs $207 | PipeRocket, 2026 |
| Cost | Brand and non-brand convert almost identically, 3.73% against 3.94% | PipeRocket, 2026 |
| Incrementality | When an advertiser already holds the top organic result, only 50% of its ad clicks are incremental | Google Research, March 2012 |
| Incrementality | A branded ad click costs $6.24 and a branded lead $68 once that 50% is applied | Computed from Google Research and PipeRocket |
| Definition | Google counts brand name, misspellings and brand-related products as branded queries | Google Search Central, November 2025 |
| Demand | Branded search volume correlates 0.392 with a brand's visibility in AI Overviews | Ahrefs, May 2025 |
| AI | 68.01% of US Google searches ended without a click in January to April 2026 | SparkToro / Similarweb, June 2026 |
How much of Google's top keyword volume is branded?
Branded queries take 77.7% of the search volume in the 100 most-searched US Google keywords, and 72 of those 100 keywords are brand names, on my own classification of Ahrefs' September 2026 data.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| YouTube is the most-searched US keyword at 85,890,000 searches a month, ahead of amazon at 85,830,000 and chatgpt at 68,580,000. | Ahrefs, September 2026 |
| 8 of the 10 most-searched US Google keywords are brand names. | Ahrefs, 2026 |
| Weather is the highest-placed non-branded US query at 40,230,000 a month, in seventh place. | Ahrefs, 2026 |
| Globally, chatgpt leads at 811,195,000 searches a month, from a 28.7 billion keyword database. | Ahrefs, 2026 |
| Semrush's separate list puts YouTube at 1.38 billion global monthly searches and ChatGPT at 1.12 billion, from 28.3 billion keywords. | Semrush, 2026 |
| 8 of Semrush's 10 most-searched global keywords are also brand names. | Semrush, 2026 |
| Google's own brands take 25.1% of branded volume in the US top 100 and 19.5% of the whole list, across 11 keywords. | Computed from Ahrefs, 2026 |
| Google holds 91.1% of worldwide search engine market share; Bing holds 4.5%. | StatCounter, August 2026 |
The head of the curve is 77.7% branded and the full query set is 44% branded, which tells you where non-branded demand lives: in the tail, spread thin across millions of terms that each get a handful of searches. Head terms are brands you cannot rank for; tail terms are the ones you can.
Two things surprised me when I classified that list. Google takes a quarter of all branded volume in the top 100 through YouTube, Gmail and Maps alone. And almost no generic queries survive in the head: weather, calculator, news, food near me. If your keyword strategy targets the head of the market, you are mostly targeting other companies' brand names.
Do branded queries earn a higher click-through rate?
Branded paid search earns a 22.21% click-through rate against 3.60% for non-branded, a 6.2x gap, for the average account in PipeRocket's analysis of 53-plus B2B SaaS Google Ads accounts between July 2025 and June 2026.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| Branded paid CTR in B2B SaaS is 22.21% against 3.60% for non-brand, for the average account across 53-plus accounts. | PipeRocket, August 2026 |
| Non-brand paid CTR in the same accounts fell 30% year over year. | PipeRocket, 2026 |
| Google states that branded queries result in higher click-through rates than non-branded queries. | Google Search Central, November 2025 |
| The #1 organic result earns 39.8% CTR and the top paid ad 2.1%, on First Page Sage's meta-analysis, which does not publish a sample size. | First Page Sage, 2025 |
| Backlinko measured 27.6% CTR at position 1 and 54.4% for the top three, across 4 million results and 12,166,560 queries. | Backlinko, April 2025 |
| Google Ads CTR across Optmyzr's accounts rose from 1.83% to 2.22%, up 21.31% year over year, while impressions fell about 11%. | Optmyzr via Search Engine Journal, Q1 2026 |
Nobody has published a clean organic branded-versus-non-branded CTR study with a stated sample, which is the biggest hole in this dataset. First Page Sage and Backlinko measure a mixed query set, so they tell you what an average result earns, not what a brand name earns. The paid-side gap of 6.2x is the best public proxy until somebody publishes the organic version.
A 22% CTR on your own name is not a marketing achievement, it is a tollbooth. The number worth watching is the 30% year-over-year fall in non-brand CTR that PipeRocket found in the same accounts. Brand clicks hold; discovery clicks are leaking, and the two lines moving apart is the whole story of search in 2026.
What does a branded click cost compared with a non-branded click?
A branded paid click costs $3.12 and a non-branded click costs $13.75 in B2B SaaS, and the lead cost gap is wider still at $34 against $207, for the average account in PipeRocket's July 2025 to June 2026 data.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| Branded clicks cost $3.12 against $13.75 for non-brand, a 4.4x difference. | PipeRocket, August 2026 |
| A branded search lead costs $34 against $207 for a non-brand lead, roughly 6x. | PipeRocket, 2026 |
| Brand and non-brand convert almost identically at 3.73% and 3.94%. | PipeRocket, 2026 |
| Branded cost per lead fell 22% year over year while non-brand cost per lead rose 16%, across accounts active in both years. | PipeRocket, 2026 |
| Google paid search spending rose nearly 14% year over year in Q2 2026 while average search CPC rose just 1%. | Tinuiti via Search Engine Journal, Q2 2026 |
| The 6.1x lead cost gap decomposes into 4.4x price of the click and only 1.06x conversion. | Computed from PipeRocket, 2026 |
That last row is the finding I would defend hardest. Brand and non-brand traffic convert within 6% of each other, so the six-fold difference in what a lead costs is almost entirely a price difference at the click. People who search your name are not better buyers than people who search your category. They are cheaper to reach, because you are the only sensible advertiser on the query.
Finance teams love branded campaigns because the cost per lead looks heroic. It is a rebate, not a performance. If branded cost per lead drops 22% in a year while non-brand rises 16%, as it did in PipeRocket's accounts, your blended number improves and your actual demand generation gets worse. Report the two separately or you will keep congratulating yourself for a metric you did not earn.
Are branded search ads worth paying for?
Branded search ads are worth roughly half of what their reported cost per lead suggests, because Google's own research found that only 50% of ad clicks are incremental when the advertiser already holds the top organic result, which is the normal situation on a brand term.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| When the advertiser holds the top organic result, only 50% of its ad clicks are incremental, across 390 search ads pause studies. | Google Research, March 2012 (DATED) |
| When the advertiser's organic result ranks 2 to 4, 82% of ad clicks are incremental; below rank 4 the figure is 96%. | Google Research, 2012 (DATED) |
| Across verticals, 89% of search ad clicks are not replaced by organic clicks when ads are paused, from 400-plus pause studies. | Google Research, August 2011 (DATED) |
| At PipeRocket's average-account brand CPC, an incremental branded click costs $6.24 and a branded lead $68. | Computed from Google Research and PipeRocket, 2026 |
| Even after that adjustment, an incremental branded lead at $68 is a third of the $207 non-brand lead. | Computed from Google Research and PipeRocket |
The two Google incrementality studies are from 2011 and 2012, and I mark them dated because they are. They remain the only large-scale pause experiments anybody has published with a stated method and sample. Google has no commercial reason to publish a number that makes brand bidding look weaker, which is the one thing that makes a 50% figure from Google credible.
Run the pause test yourself for two weeks on a slice of your brand terms and you will get a better number than any benchmark, including mine. Every time I have seen it run honestly, the answer landed between Google's 50% and total cannibalisation, and the argument for keeping the ads was never traffic. It was keeping a competitor out of the slot above your own listing.
Is branded search volume a reliable demand signal?
Branded search volume is a decent demand signal and a poor forecasting instrument. Ahrefs measured a 0.392 correlation between branded search volume and a brand's visibility in AI Overviews across 75,000 brands. Kantar widened five car brands to 30,000 related keywords and surfaced 36% more search interest than the brand names alone.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| Branded search volume correlates 0.392 with a brand's visibility in Google AI Overviews, on Spearman rank across 75,000 brands. | Ahrefs, May 2025 |
| Branded web mentions correlate 0.664 with AI Overview brand visibility, branded anchors 0.527 and backlinks only 0.218. | Ahrefs, 2025 |
| Brands in the top quarter for web mentions averaged 169 AI Overview mentions against 14 for the 50 to 75% quartile. 26% of brands had zero mentions. | Ahrefs, 2025 |
| Expanding from brand names to 30,000 related keywords added 36% more search interest, across Ford, Toyota, Chevrolet, Tesla and Dodge over four years. | Kantar, undated, content references June 2024 (DATED) |
| Branded traffic correlates 0.274 with AI Overview visibility, below branded search volume and far below branded mentions. | Ahrefs, 2025 |
Ahrefs' ordering matters more than any single coefficient. Being talked about scores 0.664, being linked to scores 0.218, and being searched for sits between them at 0.392. Branded search volume is a downstream measure of awareness someone else created, which is why it makes a better scorecard than a dial.
I use branded search volume as a thermometer, never as a lever. The moment you try to pull it, with brand campaigns or PR bursts timed to a reporting period, you break the only useful property it has: nobody was prompted to type it. Kantar's 36% is the practical warning. Track the product names and the misspellings too, or you will undercount your own demand.
How are AI Overviews and AI search changing branded search?
AI Overviews are taking clicks from every query type, and the defence that shows up in the data is brand mentions rather than rankings: Ahrefs found branded web mentions the strongest single correlate of AI Overview visibility at 0.664, while 68.01% of US Google searches ended with no click at all in early 2026.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| 68.01% of US Google searches ended without a click in January to April 2026, up from 60.45% in 2024. | SparkToro / Similarweb, June 2026 |
| For every 1,000 US Google searches, 360 clicks reached the open web, 374 in the EU. Almost 30% of clicks go to Google-owned properties. | SparkToro / Datos, July 2024 (DATED) |
| Users clicked a result on 8% of visits to pages with an AI summary, against 15% without, across 68,879 searches from 900 US adults. | Pew Research Center, July 2025 |
| 18% of Google searches in Pew's March 2025 study produced an AI summary, 12,593 of 68,879. | Pew Research Center, 2025 |
| AI Overviews on commercial-intent keywords grew 71% in six months while transactional triggers fell 5%, across 600,000-plus US desktop keywords. | Semrush, 2026 |
| Only 0.34% of US searches reached Google's AI Mode in January to April 2026, though Google said it had passed 1 billion monthly users. | SparkToro / Similarweb, 2026 |
Branded queries have one structural advantage here. A person searching your company name wants your site, so an AI summary is less likely to satisfy them than it would on a generic how-to query. That advantage is not permanent: Semrush's finding that AI Overviews now push hard into commercial intent is the direction of travel. For more on how citation is replacing ranking, see the generative engine optimization statistics page.
The brand-mention correlation is the number I would build a 2027 plan on. Ahrefs put branded web mentions at 0.664 and backlinks at 0.218 for AI Overview visibility, which means the link-building industry is optimising the weaker of the two signals. Getting named in other people's content, without a link, now looks like the better bet, and it happens to be the same work that grows branded search volume.
How we calculated the original numbers
Four figures on this page do not appear anywhere else. Here is the arithmetic, so you can check it or change the inputs.
- 77.7% of top-100 volume is branded. I took Ahrefs' September 2026 list of the 100 most-searched US Google keywords and classified each one as branded (names a specific company, product, app, website or organisation) or non-branded (generic terms, topics, people, places, events). Branded: 72 keywords, 1,137,780,000 monthly searches out of 1,464,800,000 total, so 77.7%. Judgement calls sit at the edges: sports leagues and teams counted as organisations, named people and events did not.
- 25.1% of that branded volume is Google's own. Eleven of the 72 branded keywords are Google properties: youtube, gmail, google, google translate, google docs, google maps, google flights, google classroom, gemini, google drive, google slides. They total 285,880,000 searches, which is 25.1% of branded volume and 19.5% of the whole top 100.
- $6.24 per incremental branded ad click, $68 per incremental branded lead. PipeRocket's 2026 average-account branded CPC is $3.12 and average-account branded cost per lead $34. Google's 2012 meta-analysis found 50% of ad clicks incremental when the advertiser holds the top organic result, the normal case on your own brand term. $3.12 / 0.50 = $6.24, and $34 / 0.50 = $68. The lead figure assumes incremental clicks convert at the same rate as the clicks organic would have won anyway, which Google did not test. Both stay well under the non-brand equivalents of $13.75 and $207.
- The 6.1x lead cost gap is 4.4x click price and 1.06x conversion. PipeRocket reports $207 non-brand cost per lead against $34 branded, a ratio of 6.09. The CPC ratio is $13.75 / $3.12 = 4.41 and the conversion ratio is 3.94% / 3.73% = 1.06. Price of the click explains almost all of the gap; lead quality explains almost none of it. These are average-account figures, so the components do not multiply back to the headline exactly.
What the 2026 numbers say
Branded search is bigger than most teams report and smaller than the head of the curve suggests. Forty-four percent of all US queries against 77.7% of the top-100 volume is not a contradiction, it is a shape. Brand demand is concentrated, non-brand demand is dispersed, which is why brand feels dominant in a keyword tool and merely large in a clickstream panel.
The branded cost advantage is a discount, not a performance. Brand clicks cost 4.4x less and brand leads 6.1x less, while conversion rates differ by 6%. Apply Google's 50% incrementality figure and half that advantage disappears. A board deck that reports blended cost per lead without the split is reporting brand equity as marketing efficiency.
Mentions are overtaking links as the brand signal that search systems read. Ahrefs' 0.664 for branded web mentions against 0.218 for backlinks is the most actionable number here, with branded search volume between them at 0.392. Getting into an AI answer, getting typed into the search box and getting cheap clicks all run off the same asset. Search teams have spent twenty years measuring the cheapest symptom of it.
FAQ
What percentage of Google searches are branded?
Just over 44% of US Google searches are for branded terms, according to SparkToro and Datos, who classified 331,697,810 searches from about 130,000 US devices between January 2023 and September 2024. Navigational intent, meaning searches aimed at reaching a specific site, accounts for about 33% of the same dataset.
How does Google define a branded query?
Google defines a branded query as one that includes your brand name, variations or misspellings of it, or brand-related products and services, using Gmail as the example for google.com (Google Search Central, November 2025). The classification runs on an AI-assisted internal system, not keyword rules, and Google says some queries may be misidentified.
Do branded keywords have a higher click-through rate?
Yes. Branded paid search CTR is 22.21% against 3.60% for non-branded in B2B SaaS, a 6.2x gap, across the 53-plus accounts PipeRocket measured between July 2025 and June 2026. Google's Search Console documentation says the same about organic results, though no study with a published sample has measured that split.
How much cheaper are branded clicks than non-branded clicks?
A branded click costs $3.12 against $13.75 for non-brand, and a branded lead $34 against $207, on PipeRocket's 2026 B2B SaaS benchmarks. The gap is price, not quality: brand and non-brand convert at 3.73% and 3.94%.
Should you bid on your own brand name in Google Ads?
Google's own research says half of it is wasted if you already rank first: only 50% of ad clicks are incremental when the advertiser holds the top organic result, from a 2012 meta-analysis of 390 pause studies. At PipeRocket's 2026 average-account branded CPC of $3.12, an incremental branded click really costs $6.24 and an incremental branded lead $68, still a third of the $207 non-brand lead.
Does branded search volume predict business performance?
Branded search volume is a lagging measure of awareness rather than a predictor you can steer. Ahrefs found it correlates 0.392 with AI Overview brand visibility across 75,000 brands, below branded web mentions at 0.664. Kantar's automotive analysis found that widening five car brands to 30,000 related keywords surfaced 36% more search interest, so track product and misspelling variants too.
Sources
- SparkToro / Datos, We analyzed 332 million queries over 21 months (December 2024)
- SparkToro / Similarweb, In 2026, Less than One Third of Google Searches Still Send a Click (June 2026)
- SparkToro / Datos, 2024 Zero-Click Search Study (July 2024)
- Ahrefs, Top Google Searches (September 2026)
- Ahrefs, An Analysis of AI Overview Brand Visibility Factors (May 2025)
- Semrush, Most Searched Keywords on Google (January 2026 data)
- Semrush, AI Overviews are expanding across commercial intent search (2026)
- PipeRocket, 100+ Google Ads Benchmarks for B2B SaaS (August 2026)
- Google Search Central, Introducing the branded queries filter in Search Console (November 2025, updated March 2026)
- Google Research, Impact of Organic Ranking on Ad Click Incrementality (March 2012)
- Google Research, Studies Show Search Ads Drive 89% Incremental Traffic (August 2011)
- First Page Sage, Google Click-Through Rates by Ranking Position (2025)
- Backlinko, We Analyzed 4 Million Google Search Results (April 2025)
- Tinuiti via Search Engine Journal, Paid Search Absorbed Organic's Collapse (Q2 2026 data)
- Optmyzr via Search Engine Journal, Google Ads Engagement Rising While Efficiency Holds (Q1 2026 data)
- Kantar, Demystifying share of search (undated)
- Pew Research Center, Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears (July 2025)
- StatCounter, Search Engine Market Share Worldwide (August 2026)
More search benchmarks: the organic vs paid search statistics page covers click share and cost across both channels, and the full statistics library lists every dataset on this site.
Methodology. Numbers were collected in September 2026 and checked against the original publisher's page, not against other statistics roundups. Vendor claims without a stated sample or method were excluded. The two Google incrementality studies from 2011 and 2012 are marked dated and kept because no comparable large-scale pause experiment has been published since. The Kantar piece carries no publication date and is marked dated for the same reason. The branded classification of Ahrefs' top-100 list is my own, done by hand, with the rules stated in the calculations section. Last updated 20 September 2026.