Keyword Study 2026: What 94 Domains Reveal About Organic CTR

How many of your keywords are actually doing the work? If your SEO reporting feels like a thousand tiny wins that never add up to a revenue number, you are not alone — and the data shows exactly why.

For our ongoing Keyword Study 2026 we aggregate real, anonymized Google Search Console data from every user who opts in, classify every keyword with DataForSEO's search-intent API, and publish the results as an open dashboard. The widget below is pulled live from the latest completed run — if the numbers update, so does this post.

What's inside the study

The full dashboard goes deeper than the summary above. A few of the questions it answers:

• Where does organic traffic actually come from? We plot the Pareto curve of keywords against clicks and impressions so you can see how concentrated (or long-tailed) demand really is.
• How much of your traffic is just brand search? Per-domain brand classification separates brand, generic, and competitor queries so you can see the true generic-traffic picture.
• Does intent really change CTR? We compare click-through rates for informational, transactional, and navigational intents across the same positions — the gap is bigger than most dashboards suggest.
• DE vs. US benchmarks. Country-level comparison highlights where German and English-speaking searchers behave differently at the same SERP position.

How the data is collected

The study is not a scrape. Every domain you see in the sample has voluntarily connected Google Search Console through Visibly AI and opted in to the research pool. We only read performance data for the last six months, drop any bucket with fewer than five domains (k-anonymity), and never expose the individual keyword-URL pairs — only the aggregates.

Intent is classified per keyword via DataForSEO's Search Intent API, which distinguishes four main buckets (informational, navigational, commercial, transactional) and — for German queries — runs against a German language model rather than machine translation.

Read the full study

If this summary made you curious, the full dashboard has nine interactive charts, a methodology breakdown, and every number behind the top-line findings. It is public and updates with each new run.

→ Open the Keyword Study 2026 dashboard

Related tools

Two resources pair well with the study:

• Brand Radar — monthly DataForSEO search volumes and trend percentages for 300+ DTC brands. Useful for benchmarking your own brand demand against the category you actually compete in, and for spotting which brand queries are rising fastest.
• Brand Search Volume vs. Organic Revenue — a live correlation across 181 brands showing how brand demand translates into organic traffic value, and what the 10-30% commercial-intent share actually means for revenue.