Report: Bing sees 15.8% boost in visits following GPT-4 push, as Google sees a slight decline

Ben Schoon | Mar 23 2023 - 1:34 pm PT

Microsoft bet big on AI with the “new Bing,” and it seems the gamble succeeded, with Bing gaining new users as Google sees a slight decline.

As reported by Reuters, Microsoft is seeing a boost of roughly 16% on page visits to Bing since the launch of its GPT-4-powered “new Bing” chat experience. The “co-pilot” seems to be drawing in a considerable number of new users, as Microsoft itself earlier this month confirmed that Bing had surpassed 100 million active users for the first time.

The 15.8% boost in page visits is seen with data since Microsoft’s February 7 launch of the “new Bing,” and shows that Microsoft is making progress in its goal to pull users away from Google’s dominance in the search space.

Google’s numbers are reportedly down, with a dip of around 1% during that same time period.

Obviously, 1% isn’t a huge hit to take, but it is a considerable number of people. Analyst Gil Luria said that even 1-2% of Google’s users converting to Bing would be “materially beneficial” to Microsoft. Similar to dips in page visits, downloads of the Bing and Google apps on mobile are seeing notable changes. Comparing February 5 through March 11 to the month prior, Bing saw nearly 8x as many downloads, while Google saw a dip of around 2%.

Google certainly isn’t throwing in the towel, as the company just launched a preview of Bard, its own generative AI product, and has also teased how the technology will eventually integrate with Search and other Google products such as Workspace. But, as it stands, Google is clearly a bit behind the curve.