Advanced Web Ranking's second-quarter search click-through data show desktop and mobile moving in opposite directions at Google's leading organic positions, according to Search Engine Journal's September 29 coverage. The desktop declines reverse the previous quarter's pattern. A Google Search Console logging error affected part of the period, complicating the comparison.
For international searches overall, changes at desktop positions one and two added up to a decline of 5.27 percentage points between the first and second quarters. The equivalent mobile changes summed to a gain of 6.59 points. These totals combine movements at separate ranking positions. They are not percentage changes in traffic and do not describe the performance of an individual website.
The split appears in more detailed query categories. For single-word searches, first-position desktop CTR fell 4.15 points while mobile rose 7.42 points. Desktop branded searches declined at every position in the top 20, with falls ranging from 1.47 to 3.08 points. Mobile's first branded result rose 1.40 points. Most industries followed the same split; the one named outlier, Arts & Entertainment, added 2.40 points in the top desktop spot. The largest single-position gain among industries was 17.31 points at mobile position one in Law, Government & Politics, and the largest drop was 13.31 points at desktop position one in Style & Fashion.
A separate analysis of AI Overview results uses US data only. Desktop positions one and two together received 29.05% CTR on pages without an AI Overview, compared with 10.04% where one appeared. That 19.01-point gap was 6.03 points wider than in the first quarter. The first mobile result drew 8.51% of impressions into clicks when an overview appeared; in its absence, that rate reached 35.95%. Monthly figures show variation hidden by a quarterly average: US desktop position one on overview pages went from 1.96% in April to 10.23% in June.
Search Engine Journal identifies a separate complication in the underlying measurement. Google said impressions were logged inaccurately from May 13, 2025, through April 27, 2026. CTR and average position were affected, while click totals were not. AWR's free CTR tool uses Search Console data, and its quarterly report credits that tool. The report does not specify whether the series was recalculated following the correction.
CTR divides clicks by impressions, so an error in the denominator can change the rate without changing the number of clicks. All of the first quarter falls within the stated error period, whereas most of the second quarter follows it. These comparisons alone cannot establish changed user behavior or a causal effect from AI Overviews.
The third quarter covers July through September, entirely after the correction. AWR says its next report will revisit whether the device split persists. That later period offers a different measurement context, while comparisons involving the second quarter will still include April's overlap with the logging problem.