Google Search has been a dominant force in search for years now, but slowly it seems to be eroding as competitors get better, and as Google Search continues to grow a reputation for being worse and worse at its core job. And, now, Google Search appears to have hit its lowest market share in a decade.
As first spotted by SearchEngineLand, Google has dropped below 90% share in the worldwide search engine market over the past three months, marking a clear trend. The last time that Google’s share was under 90% for three months was in early 2015. The data is provided by StatCounter, which uses tracking data on millions of websites to find trends among search engines, device usage, and more. That data isn’t infallible to mistakes, as we likely saw with recent Google Pixel data, but there’s obviously a trend in this case.
Why the drop in Google Search usage?
There are likely a lot of factors at play, but one highly likely reason is increased competition. The generative AI boom has led to new search offerings such as Perplexity and even OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Privacy-conscious users may have also adopted alternate search engines. StatCounter doesn’t provide much insight there, beyond showing that Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex all very slightly grew (still fluctuating) while Google shrank.
Another point to consider is that, especially among younger audiences, TikTok is becoming a go-to location for searching for information, to the point where TikTok even tested linking out to Google Search in its own app. Google also started sourcing TikTok in early 2024.
More on Google Search:
- Google’s ‘Daily Listen’ lab is a personalized podcast based on your Discover feed
- Google teases ‘AI Mode’ as new way to talk to Search [APK Insight]
- Google’s iOS app now injects links on third-party websites that go back to Search
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