oost Bing’s share of the market is declining after 6 months //
The new AI-powered Bing chat launched just six months ago, but the search engine’s overall market share has dropped slightly in the U.S. and globally.
Why do we care? The launch of the new Bing felt like a new exciting era for search. Microsoft had a real chance to challenge Google and be a true competitor, with its conversational AI approach to search. Unfortunately, this hasn’t been the case.
The numbers According to web analytics service statCounter, Bing’s U.S. market share in search was 6.47% during July.
- When Bing was launched in February, its market share stood at 6.35%. Bing’s share of the market peaked in March at 6.61%.
- Bing’s U.S. share of the market was usually over 7% by 2022 with a peak of 7.82% recorded in November.
StatCounter reports that Bing’s share of the global search market was 2.99% as of July.
- Bing had the highest global search share this year in January at 3.03%. This was a full month before Bing 2.0 was announced. Bing’s market share will be consistently above 3% in 2022.
Microsoft disputes the numbers. An article in today’s WSJ (paywalled so I can’t link to it) stated that:
- Microsoft disputed the outside data by claiming that third-party companies don’t measure all of the people who go directly to Bing chat.
StatCounter says it takes into account traffic from and to Bing’s Chat. SimilarWeb, a digital intelligence platform, told me the following:
- It’s possible we’re not seeing some Bing Chat interactions because they use an Edge sidebar/extension. However, I’m not sure how important that is.
Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi told WSJ that internal Microsoft data showed Bing taking the market share away from Google. However, he did not provide any figures.
- “We have made more progress than in the past decade or two combined.” Mehdi stated that he was pleased with the start.
According to comScore , Bing had a search market share of 17.9% around the same time 10 years prior.
Microsoft’s blog entry from Aug. 7,, highlighting the number chats (one billion) and images (750 millions), as well nine quarters of Edge growth. It earned them a surprising PR amount thanks to the many publications that covered the launchiversary. (Search Engine Land wasn’t one of those because there was no new information to report).
Additional data. In addition, I checked with SimilarWeb for the latest data. A spokesperson for SimilarWeb told me the following:
- We can see some growth, but it is incremental. According to our official rankings in the search engine category they were the second search engine, with just over 2% of traffic share in the U.S., but only about 1% globally.
According to comScore’s data, Bing experienced a 6% drop in unique visitors from February to July. Bing’s total visits and unique visitors also decreased 2% in July.
What is the AI boost? Bing’s share of the market is down six months after launch, first appeared on MarTech.