There are two ways to get on the first page of Google: pay for a Google Ads ad, which puts you on the page the same day, or get a page of your site into the organic results with SEO, which takes months. But the first page isn't a single place. There's one for every search, and today it holds fewer links than most people think.
On 10 October 2026 we checked 8 first pages of Google UK, on searches ranging from "plumber london" to "cnc machining". They had 8.6 organic results on average, not 10. In 5 of the 8 an AI Overview sat above the first link; in 3 the first organic result was only the fifth element on the page, after a directory box and the map. On none of them was an organic link the first thing you saw. Below you'll find the data, then the two routes one at a time, with measured times and costs.
What's on Google's first page today
Google's first page is everything Google shows before the link to the next page: organic results, ads, the local map, AI Overviews, videos, related questions. The organic links are only one part, and in the UK almost all the competition happens on Google: it handles 91.39% of searches according to StatCounter (September 2026), with Bing on 6.08%.
The table shows 8 desktop checks on Google UK, run with DataForSEO. The "position of the first organic" column counts every element before it, including AI Overviews and map listings.
| Search | Organic links | Position of the first organic | AI Overview | Local map | What comes before the first organic |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| how to get on the first page of google | 8 | 4 | yes | no | AI Overview, videos, People also ask |
| plumber london | 10 | 5 | no | yes | "Find results on" box, map with 3 businesses |
| dentist london | 10 | 5 | no | yes | "Find results on" box, map with 3 businesses |
| accountant london | 10 | 5 | no | yes | "Find results on" box, map with 3 businesses |
| car insurance | 9 | 2 | yes | no | AI Overview |
| walking boots | 9 | 2 | yes | no | AI Overview |
| cnc machining | 7 | 4 | yes | no | AI Overview, videos, People also ask |
| how to remove limescale from shower | 6 | 4 | yes | no | AI Overview, videos, People also ask |
| Total | 8.6 on average | 0 of 8 at the top | 5 of 8 | 3 of 8 |
The table shows three very different kinds of first page.
- On informational searches (limescale, CNC machining, the question this article answers) the AI Overview comes first, followed by videos and related questions, and the organic links drop to 6-8. Getting on the first page here brings fewer clicks than it did two years ago.
- On local searches (plumber, dentist, accountant in London) the first organic link is the fifth element, and among the ten organic results you find Checkatrade, Bark, TrustATrader, Top Doctors, nhs.uk, Unbiased and VouchedFor: directories, not firms.
- On commercial searches (car insurance, walking boots) the organic results are still nine and start in second place, but an AI Overview sits above them. In a similar check we ran on Google Italy, product searches still had the classic page with the first organic result at the top; in the UK even "walking boots" opens with a generated answer listing boots and prices.
So the useful question isn't how to get on the first page, but which first page and which part of it. If you want the detail on each block, see our guide to the Google SERP.
The two routes: Google Ads in a day, SEO in months
With Google Ads you buy your place. The ad appears when you win the auction and you pay for every click. Position doesn't depend only on how much you bid, though: Google Ads documentation lists six factors, including the quality of the ad and of the landing page and the context of the search. With SEO you don't pay for the click but for the work, and the algorithm decides the position.
The cost of the paid route comes down to CPC, the cost of one click. Here are four searches, three of them from the table, with the Google Ads figures we pulled for this article. There's more on budgets in our guide to Google Ads for small businesses.
| Search | Average CPC | Cost of one enquiry at a 5% conversion rate |
|---|---|---|
| led wall | £3.03 | £61 |
| plumber london | £7.32 | £146 |
| dentist london | £7.99 | £160 |
| accountant london | £9.49 | £190 |
The two routes aren't mutually exclusive. This is how we use them together: Ads on the searches where you need to be visible straight away, partly to learn which terms bring enquiries; SEO on the same terms, so you can stop paying for them within one or two years. The full reasoning is in SEO and Google Ads: how they work together.
First rule: the page has to be in the index
A page Google hasn't indexed can't appear on any results page. It's the first thing we check when someone tells us their site can't be found, and it happens more often than you'd think: a noindex left behind by the theme, a canonical pointing somewhere else, a page that was never crawled because no internal link leads to it.
You check it in Google Search Console with the URL Inspection tool: paste the address and you'll see whether the page is in the index, when Google last crawled it and which version it treats as canonical. If it isn't indexed, request indexing from the same tool. If the problem affects the whole site, the list of checks is in why your site isn't showing on Google.
Pick a first page you can win
Every search has its own first page, and some are closed. For "car insurance" the nine organic results are Aviva, Compare the Market, GoCompare, Allianz, LV=, GOV.UK, MoneySuperMarket, Confused.com and Swinton: insurers, comparison sites and a national broker with huge advertising budgets, plus the government. A local broker won't get in there, and shouldn't try.
The check before choosing a keyword is simple: search for it on Google and look at who's there. If the first page is all national brands, marketplaces and directories, get more specific. "Plumber london" becomes "unvented cylinder replacement croydon", "car insurance" becomes "van fleet insurance". Fewer searches, a clearer intent, a more open first page. That's what long-tail keywords are for, and the keyword difficulty score in SEO tools is a useful guide as long as you check it against the real SERP.
The second check is format. If Google shows only guides for your term, a service page won't get in; if it shows only product pages, neither will a blog post. You read search intent from the SERP, not from the title you'd like to write.
Start with the pages already on page two
The shortest route to page one goes through page two. Google already considers a page in positions 11-20 relevant. It usually needs only a little more: a paragraph that answers the question better, a title closer to how people search, two or three internal links from strong pages on the site.
In Search Console, open the Performance report, switch on average position, filter for queries with a position greater than 10 and sort by impressions. At the top you'll find the searches where your site appears but nobody sees it: in Backlinko's study of 4 million results, only 0.63% of searchers click a result on page two, while the top three take 54.4% of clicks (international sample, not broken down by country). For each of those queries, open the page that ranks and compare it with the top five: what do they have that it doesn't?
It's the first thing we do on new projects, because it costs little and the movement shows up within weeks.
What a page needs to climb
Google doesn't reward a page for being long or for repeating the keyword twenty times. It rewards the one that best answers the search. On the queries we track, the pages that climb almost always have three things in common:
- the answer comes in the first few lines, with no preamble;
- there's something the other pages don't have: a price, a photo of the finished job, a figure, a case with names and numbers;
- the title and meta description say exactly what's inside, because they're the page's shop window in the SERP.
The technical bar is lower than it's often made out to be. The page has to read well on a phone, load quickly and not shift the content around while you're reading: those are the Core Web Vitals. A technically clean site doesn't climb on its own. A site that's slow or broken on mobile, however, loses positions its content deserves.
Then there are links from other sites. The SERP tells you how many you need: if the top results are cited by dozens of sites, a page with no external links won't overtake them. On niche queries a few are enough, as long as they come from sites in your sector. How to earn them without buying them is explained in our guide to link building.
Local searches: a first page of maps and directories
For "plumber london", "dentist london" and "accountant london" the page we checked opens with a "Find results on" box pointing to directories, then the map with three businesses, then the organic results. Among the ten organic results for "plumber london", six aren't plumbers' own sites: Checkatrade, TrustATrader, Bark, HaMuch, FreeIndex and a Facebook group. For "accountant london" there are four: Unbiased, VouchedFor, the ICAEW directory and Bark. For "dentist london" there are Top Doctors and an nhs.uk listing, alongside mydentist, the UK's largest chain of practices.
For a local business, then, there are three first pages to win, in order of speed. The map, with a complete Google Business Profile and recent reviews. Your listing on the directories Google already puts on the first page. Your own site, where the move that pays off most is one page per service and per area, instead of a home page that tries to rank for everything. The method is in our guide to local SEO, and for dental practices there's a case with numbers in SEO for dentists.
The AI Overview above the first result
On informational searches the first page now opens with a generated answer. In our check this happened on 5 searches out of 8, including the one this article starts from: the AI Overview for "how to get on the first page of google" cites Serenity Digital, SEO.com, NitroPack, Clearscope, Semrush, Quora and two YouTube videos, before any organic link.
The effect on clicks has so far been measured mainly in the United States. Ahrefs compared 300,000 keywords between March 2024 and March 2025: when an AI Overview was present, the click-through rate of position one was 34.5% lower (Google US). The Pew Research Center followed 900 US adults throughout March 2025: when an AI summary appeared, they clicked a result on 8% of visits, against 15% without one. We haven't found a UK study of the same scale; on the sites we work on in Italy and Switzerland the direction is the same, with impressions growing faster than clicks.
On these searches, the first page that counts is also the source cited in the answer. The pages we see cited most often have the answer up front, subheadings written as questions and data with a source. The detail is in AI Overviews and, for ChatGPT, in how to appear in ChatGPT answers.
How long it takes
On competitive searches, longer than you'll be told. The largest study is by Ahrefs, rerun in 2025 on 2 million pages created in October 2023 and 1.3 million US keywords: only 1.74% of new pages reached the top 10 within a year. 72.9% of pages in the top 10 are more than three years old, and the page in position one is five years old on average. One figure points the other way: of the pages that do reach the top 10, 40.82% get there within the first month. Easy queries are won straight away or nearly; hard ones take years.
We see the same pattern on our projects in Italy. Macropix, a Milan manufacturer of LED screens, moved from position 88 to 2 for "monitor pubblicitario" (advertising display) after five years of continuous work; it now has a 25.55% share of voice on its keywords, ahead of Amazon at 18.08% (Semrush, July 2026), and in our Italian check it was the third organic result for "ledwall" (LED wall). The detail is in the Macropix case study and in our guide to SEO for manufacturing.
On an Italian dental sector site we work on, average position rose from 47.5 to 16.9 in eight months, while daily clicks went from 1.31 to 1.78. Position moves first, clicks come later. The stages and their timings are in how long SEO takes to show results.
Who guarantees the first page
Nobody, and Google says so: "No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google." The same documentation page warns against SEOs who claim to guarantee rankings or allege a "special relationship" with Google. When someone sells a guaranteed first page, they're usually talking about a term nobody searches for, your company name, or a Google Ads ad dressed up as SEO.
The questions to ask a consultant are different: on which searches, with what volume, in how long and measured how. That's the format we use for proposals for our SEO service and Google Ads service.
The quickest first page often isn't yours
For many local businesses the quickest first page to reach isn't their own site's: it's the listing on the directory Google has already put on the first page. A complete profile on Checkatrade, Bark or Top Doctors, with genuine reviews, already appears today for "plumber london" or "dentist london", in place of a site that would take two years to get there. It gets little attention because it isn't work an agency can bill as SEO. But it's the first page that people looking for you see right now.
Frequently asked questions
Yes. With SEO you don't pay for clicks but with time: useful pages, a site that works, links from other sites. On niche searches in-house work may be enough; on competitive ones you need months of continuous work.
Yes, but only with a Google Ads ad or on searches for your company name. In the organic results, on a generic search, no: in the 2025 Ahrefs study only 1.74% of new pages reached the top 10 within a year.
It depends on the search. In our check of 8 UK searches (10 October 2026) organic links ranged from 6 to 10, with an average of 8.6, plus AI Overviews, maps, videos and ads.
It depends on how much time you have and how much a click costs. If an enquiry through Ads costs you less than the margin it brings, Ads pays off straight away. SEO pays off on the searches you'll need to cover for years, because you don't pay for every visit.
Usually for one of two reasons: above your link there are AI Overviews, a map or directories taking the attention, or your title and description don't make people want to click. In Search Console compare impressions and CTR query by query: a very low CTR for the position points to a snippet problem.
Yes, on local searches. Your profile is what appears in the map, which on searches like "dentist london" comes before all the organic results.
