There are types of queries that people discount. Navigational queries for instance, that essentially use Google as a spellcheck + DNS.

And many queries that are solved with 0 visits, thanks to the information being pulled out from the wiki, or giving up and rephrasing the query.

After those, then yes, most queries will be answered by the first page. It's what retrieval is optimized for.

I imagine that each additional page presentation is exponentially less likely to be reached and considered a 'reputable' result by someone normal.

If I'm looking for a specific issue I'll sometimes try out things as deep as 10 or more pages of search results if nothing on the first 100 ish hits selects the issue, but then only if I can't think of any keyword variations to use that might get me a better result match. I don't expect the average user to go even remotely that far.

I always read the 2nd page because the 1st is all SEO crap.

Source: https://www.sistrix.com/blog/why-almost-everything-you-knew-...

TLDR: on the second results page, each result gets <1% click through rate.

So it‘s not nobody, but statistically speaking not very many.

That's not how statistics work. I consider myself a frequent visitor of the second results page, but even for me the CTR of the results on the second page are < 1 %, because I almost always find the thing I want on the first page.

The question ought to be "conditional on not finding the result on the first page, how likely is the user to go to the second page versus balk, or re-try a different query?"

I'm fairly confident that number is higher than 1 %, but I don't have the data.

Or alternatively, a number "significantly less than 1%" is still massive when multiplied by the number of searches google gets.

But how much is this affected by my caveat inside the parentheses ?