It depends on where you rank organically for that same search. If your site is the first organic result, about half the clicks the ad charges you for would have happened without it. If you are not on the first page at all, almost every ad click is new. It is not a yes-or-no rule for the whole account: it changes search by search, which is why you check it search by search.
The typical case looks like this. You open the search terms report and the brand campaign has the best ROAS in the account, by a mile. You open Search Console and for that same search your site ranks first organically, with a huge CTR. Both things are true, and both describe the same person: they searched your name, saw your ad on top and your organic result underneath, and clicked the first thing they found. The ad charged you for a click the result below it was about to get for free.
What happens when you pause the ad
The most honest way to measure this is to turn the ad off and count how many clicks come back through the organic result. Google did exactly that, many times, with real advertisers, and published the results.
In July 2011 they analyzed more than 400 accounts that had paused their search ads. The average: 89% of the traffic the ads were bringing did not come back through organic when the ads went off. That is the number Google quotes whenever someone asks whether paid search cannibalizes organic, and on average it is true.
The problem is the average. In March 2012 they went back to 390 of those experiments, this time splitting them by the advertiser's organic rank on the same search. That is where the story changes.
| Your organic rank on that search | Ad clicks that are new | Clicks you already had |
|---|---|---|
| First | 50% | 1 in 2 |
| Second to fourth | 82% | 1 in 5 or 6 |
| Fifth or lower | 96% | 1 in 25 |
| Not on the first page | Almost all | Almost none |
The 89% comes from the fact that, across those 390 experiments, 81% of ad impressions and 66% of ad clicks happened on searches where the advertiser had no organic result on the first page at all. So the average is dominated by searches where you are not competing with yourself. On the ones where you are, which tend to be your brand and your best-known products, half the spend buys clicks that were already yours.
Two caveats. Both studies were run by Google, which sells the ads, using a controlled-experiment method that is published and sound. And they are from 2012: today's first organic position sits lower on the screen than it did then, with more ads, more modules and sometimes an AI Overview on top, so the exact split in your account may differ. What has not changed is the logic: the higher you rank for free, the less the click you pay for is worth.
Your own brand name is the extreme case
When someone searches your name, you rank first organically almost by definition. It is the search where the ad and the free result overlap the most, and where two experiments from outside Google went furthest.
The best-known one is eBay in 2015. Three economists switched off brand ads in entire regions of the United States and measured what happened to traffic and sales. The brand ads had no measurable short-term benefit: people searching for "ebay" came in through the organic result anyway. On non-brand searches the average return was negative, because most of the spend went to frequent buyers who were going to buy regardless. The ads did move new and infrequent users.
The second is quoted less and is more useful, because it explains when bidding does pay off. In 2018, Simonov, Nosko and Rao ran large-scale experiments on Bing across thousands of brands. When nobody else bids on a brand's name, its own ad adds between 1% and 4% more clicks on top of what organic already brings. But when a competitor holds the top ad and the brand does not defend itself, that competitor takes between 18% and 42% of the clicks on that search.
So the brand campaign is not an acquisition campaign. It is insurance. If nobody bids on your name, you are paying a premium against a risk that does not exist today. If someone does, the insurance is worth every dollar. The difference between the two cases takes five minutes to check and changes every month.
What the most recent tests show
The Google, eBay and Bing experiments are more than ten years old, and it is fair to ask whether they still hold. The incrementality tests published in 2025 and 2026 point in the same direction, with one nuance that matters: not every brand recovers as much through organic as eBay did.
Stella published the results of 225 geo-based incrementality tests run between August 2024 and December 2025 on direct-to-consumer brands. Branded Search on Google was the channel with the lowest incremental return of all: an incremental ROAS of 0.70, when the platform typically reports 5 to 10 times more. They read it as defensive value, not failure. It is the same conclusion as the Bing experiment, with data from months ago.
Measured documented in 2026 the case of a premium fashion retailer that switched off branded Search in part of its markets. It lost seven orders. The platform had overstated the impact by up to five times. The brand cut branded spend by 84% and six months later still kept more than 99% of its orders.
The counterexample is Edmunds, a US car-shopping site that switched off brand ads in 105 of its 210 markets, the same year as eBay. Unlike eBay, which recovered 99.5% of the traffic through organic, Edmunds lost more than half of its branded traffic, and up to 72% in the markets where it was searched the most. It is the case of a mid-sized brand whose organic result does not capture the whole search for its name, and it is the reason the test is run on your account rather than copied from a study.
The four cases that show up when you cross paid and organic
If you put the searches where you pay next to the searches where you rank organically, every term falls into one of four cases. It is worth naming them, because the decision is different in each one.
| Case | What you see | What usually makes sense |
|---|---|---|
| Paying on top of strong organic | Organic rank 1 to 3, and no competitor in the ads | Lower the bid or test a pause. This is where the overlap lives. |
| Defending the position | Strong organic, but a competitor in the top ad | Keep the ad. It is insurance, and it is measured as such. |
| The ad fills a gap | Organic rank beyond 10, or absent | This is where the money works. Almost every click is new. |
| Both with volume | Organic rank 4 to 10, with both paid and organic clicks | Look at which one takes the majority. If the ad keeps more than 60%, it is probably taking clicks from organic. |
The third case is also a content map. Every search where you pay because you do not rank organically is a page you have not written yet, or wrote and does not rank. Google is already telling you, with your own money, which topics have demand and convert. There is no better keyword research than the search terms report of a campaign that converts.
How to check it with what you already have
You do not need a new tool. Google Ads ships a paid and organic report that shows, for every search, how many impressions and clicks you got with the ad alone, with the organic result alone, and with both at once. It is tucked away under Reports, and for it to show up you have to link your Search Console account to your Google Ads account.
It has three limits worth knowing before you draw conclusions. It only counts text ads: Shopping and Performance Max are not included. Organic data starts on the day you linked the accounts, not before. And the ad's "search term" is not the keyword you bought: with broad match, one keyword fires on hundreds of different searches, and the overlap is measured on the actual search.
If you would rather do it by hand, two exports are enough. From Search Console, the queries of the last 28 days with clicks, impressions and position. From Google Ads, the search terms report for the same period. Join them on the text of the search and assign each term one of the four cases in the table, based on organic rank and on whether there are competitors in the ad slot. For the latter, the auction insights report of the brand campaign tells you which domains compete and with what impression share.
Two things do not show up in any report and have to be checked separately. The first is the actual screen: search your brand in incognito, from your customers' city and from a phone, and look at what sits above your organic result. The second is seasonality: a crossover done during Black Friday week or a Hot Sale does not represent the rest of the year.
What to do with each case, without switching everything off
Four moves, from least to most risky.
1. Test a brand pause by region. If nobody bids on your name, pause the brand campaign for two or three weeks in one region and keep it running in a similar one. Compare total clicks, organic plus paid, and total sales from the store or the CRM, not Google Ads conversions. The brand campaign's conversions will drop to zero no matter what, because they start counting as organic, and that number tells you nothing. It is the same rule as in the article on why Google Ads and Meta both claim the same sale: the real total is the ceiling, everything else is allocation.
2. Lower the bid where you rank 1 to 3. On non-brand searches where you rank high organically and nobody competes in the ads, you do not need to switch anything off. Lower the bid or the priority on that term and watch whether total clicks hold. If they hold, you just found budget. If they drop, go back and note that this term does need it.
3. Move that budget to where you do not rank. The searches where the ad fills a gap are the ones with 96% incrementality. If the campaign is limited by budget, this is where every new dollar buys clicks you had no other way of getting. In parallel, those same searches are the list of content to write so you can stop paying for them in six months.
4. Measure the insurance as insurance. If there are competitors on your brand, the brand campaign stays. But its ROAS is no longer the number that matters, because it is inflated by clicks that were already yours. The number that matters is what it would cost you not to be there: the 18% to 42% of your brand clicks a competitor takes, multiplied by what a customer who was already looking for you is worth. It almost always justifies the spend. But it is a different calculation, and it deserves that name.
This crossover frees up more money per hour invested than anything else you can do in a Search account, and almost nobody does it because the data lives in two different tools. In Dashcrab, Search Console queries and Google Ads search terms are crossed automatically and every term comes out already sorted into one of these cases. But doing it by hand, once a quarter, already changes decisions.
The incrementality percentages by organic rank come from the 390 experiments Google published in March 2012 and are averages across many advertisers, not a prediction for any one account. The eBay and Bing results apply to those advertisers and that search engine at the time of each study. The figures in the cases table, such as the 60% threshold, are working rules of thumb, not data from a study.