le Search: The new Bing makes small gains
Although it’s early days in the AI search engine arms race for the top, Microsoft appears to have made significant gains over Google with the new Bing.
Microsoft previously stated that only a third of preview users were new users to Bing, and that Bing had passed 100 million daily active users after the release of Bing’s new preview.
Similarweb data was also available elsewhere:
“…page views on Bing have increased 15.8% since Microsoft Corp launched its artificial intelligence-powered version of the search engine on February 7, while data until March 20 showed a nearly 1% drop for Alphabet Inc’s search engine.
– Reuters OpenAI tech gives Microsoft a boost in search competition with Google
Why do we care? If Microsoft Bing grows its search share, it means that your site could potentially get more organic traffic through Bing. Some brands and publishers are beginning to see Bing traffic increasing. It is always a good sign that Google traffic is becoming less dependent on us.
Similarweb has more. The last seven days:
- Traffic to Bing.com is up by 15.4%
- Google.com traffic down 2.4%
Over the past 28 days, bing.com grew 13.6% while google.com dipped 2.8%. Similarweb also reported this:
This performance could be due to the integration of ChatGPT-like functionality by Microsoft’s partnership With OpenAI. However, Bing has made monthly incremental gains of up to 10% year-over–year for the past few years, often at Google’s expense.
– Similarweb Microsoft leads in incorporating ChatGPT features at least partially of the story
Those traffic gains to Bing were insignificant compared to ChatGPT’s (chat.openai.com) traffic growth, which was up 21.3% each week.
Publisher traffic. Bing was only 1.22% of Search Engine Land’s organic search traffic before February 7, the day that Bing was launched. Bing now has a 2.6% share. Google is still the dominant search engine. It has fallen from 98.2% before February 7th to 96.7% now.
Traffic to Search Engine Roundtable has increased 155% through Bing. Barry Schwartz shared this data earlier today via Twitter.
According to a tweet from Jez Corden (managing editor of Windows Central), Bing is growing in importance as a referral source.
Social engagement data. Google up, Comscore down. However, the company shared some data with Search Engine Land ( Source: Comscore Social Content Pulse, March 1, 21-22, 2022, & 2023).
- Engagement in posts on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram that mention “search” or “Google” is down 71% from March 2022 to March 2023.
- Year-over-year, posts on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram mentioning “Bing”, and “search” have increased by 48%
The post New Bing makes (small) gains in Google Search was first published on Search Engine Land.