THE VERDICT
● Crawl: Bing hit us 6.4 times as often as Google over 57 days.
● Clicks: roughly equal, from one sixth of the impressions.
● The honest caveat: Google is still far larger in absolute terms for most sites. This is one site in one category.
The numbers
| Google | Bing |
|---|
| Crawler hits, 57 days | 12,927 | 82,976 |
| Impressions, 7 days | 405,096 | 63,200 |
| Clicks, 7 days | 1,028 | 1,100 |
| Click-through rate | 0.25% | 1.69% |
| Best comparison query | 12.82% on one term | 9.86% on codex vs claude code |
Why the gap exists
IT IS NOT RANKING
We checked position against click rate across 33 countries with more than a thousand impressions each. Positions cluster between 4.8 and 7.6. Click rates range from 0.04 percent to 1.70 percent. Position explains about 16 percent of the variance.
The clearest case: we rank at 4.82 in one market and convert at 0.12 percent, and rank at 6.77 in another and convert at 1.23 percent. Two positions worse, ten times the clicks.
Two structural differences explain most of it. Google answers more queries on the results page, so a page-one ranking on a factual question earns an impression and no click. And Google barely crawls us - 227 hits a day across a site with hundreds of URLs means most pages are rarely looked at, and a page cannot rank on an index that does not read it.
What we would do differently knowing this
- Stop reading site-wide CTR as a quality signal. Two pages holding 57.7 percent of our impressions produced 17 clicks between them. Every average was poisoned by them.
- Spend crawl budget deliberately. If Google reads 227 pages a day, five near-duplicate pages on one topic are four wasted reads.
- Write for the query type that survives. Comparison queries on our site run 8.16 percent against a 0.25 percent site average. Factual queries run close to zero because the answer appears above us.
- Do not abandon Google. It is still 56 percent of impressions and its absolute click volume matches Bing. The point is the efficiency, not the winner.
Which to prioritise
| If you... | The read |
|---|
| Publish comparisons and reviews | Bing and Copilot are underweighted in most strategies. Submit via IndexNow |
| Publish definitional or reference content | Expect low click rates on both. The answer gets shown, not clicked |
| Have low Googlebot activity | Consolidate duplicates before writing anything new |
| Are judging a week by CTR | Exclude your biggest impression sinks first, or the number means nothing |
The caveat
This is one site in one category. We cover AI tools, which is precisely the subject area most exposed to AI answer boxes, so our Google click rate is probably worse than a typical publisher's. Treat the method as transferable and the magnitudes as ours. If your own logs disagree, we would rather see them than argue.
FAQ
Does Bing send more traffic than Google?
For this site in this period, roughly the same number of clicks from about one sixth of the impressions. Absolute volume was comparable; efficiency was not.
Why is our Google CTR so low?
Mostly because factual queries are answered on the results page, and partly because large low-quality impression sources inflate the denominator. Exclude those before drawing a conclusion.
How often does Googlebot crawl a small site?
Ours averaged 227 hits a day across 57 days against 1,456 from Bingbot. Your figures will differ, but the ratio is worth measuring before you assume a ranking problem.