It’s been simply over six months for the reason that new AI-powered Bing with Bing Chat launched – however its total search engine market share stays just about unchanged globally and within the U.S.
Why we care. When the brand new Bing launched, it felt just like the daybreak of an thrilling new period in search. Microsoft appeared to have a official probability to erode a few of Google’s dominance and change into a very worthy competitor to Google, because of its new conversational and generative AI tackle search. Sadly, that hasn’t occurred.
By the numbers. Bing’s U.S. search market share was 6.47% in July, per net analytics service StatCounter.
- In February, when new Bing launched, it’s market share was 6.35%. Bing’s market share peaked at 6.61% in March.
- However Bing’s U.S. market share was sometimes over 7% in 2022, with a excessive of seven.82% in November.
Bing’s international search market share was 2.99% in July, per StatCounter.
- The best Bing’s international search market share has been this yr was in January, at 3.03%, a month earlier than new Bing was introduced. In 2022, Bing was constantly over 3%.
Microsoft disputes these numbers. A WSJ article in the present day (paywalled, so I’m not linking to it) famous that:
- “[Microsoft] disputed exterior information, saying third-party information corporations aren’t measuring all of the people who find themselves going on to Bing’s chat web page.”
StatCounter stated its information takes site visitors to and from Bing’s chat into consideration. Right here’s what digital intelligence platform SimilarWeb informed me:
- “It’s potential that we’re lacking among the Bing Chat interactions that use an Edge sidebar / extension, however I don’t understand how vital that’s within the grand scheme of issues.”
Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s company VP and shopper CMO, informed WSJ the corporate’s inner information reveals Bing taking market share from Google, however failed to offer any figures.
- “We’ve made extra progress within the final six months than we have now within the earlier decade or two mixed. We’re delighted with our begin,” Mehdi stated.
This declare appears a bit odd, contemplating round this time 10 years in the past, Bing’s search market share was 17.9%, per comScore.
How Microsoft celebrates six months. Microsoft’s Aug. 7 weblog submit highlighting the variety of chats (1 billion) and pictures created (750 million), in addition to 9 quarters of development for Edge. And it earned them a shocking quantity of PR because of many publications masking the launchiversary (Search Engine Land was not amongst these, as a result of there was nothing new to report back to you).
Extra information. I additionally checked with SimilarWeb and comScore for his or her newest information on Bing’s lack of development. Right here’s what a SimilarWeb spokesperson informed me:
- “We will see a bit little bit of development for Bing, nevertheless it’s incremental. In accordance with our official rankings for the search engine class, they had been the #2 search engine with a bit over 2% site visitors share within the U.S. as of July, however nonetheless at about 1% worldwide.”
In the meantime, Bing noticed a 6% decline in distinctive guests and complete visits from February to July, in response to information from analytics agency comScore. Bing’s distinctive guests and complete visits additionally declined 2% yr on yr in July.
Dig deeper. Right here’s a few of our earlier protection of the AI search engine arms race that by no means truly turned a race: