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 likelihood to erode a few of Google’s dominance and turn into a really worthy competitor to Google, due to 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 very 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 persistently over 3%.
Microsoft disputes these numbers. A WSJ article right this moment (paywalled, so I’m not linking to it) famous that:
- “[Microsoft] disputed outdoors information, saying third-party information firms aren’t measuring all of the people who find themselves going on to Bing’s chat web page.”
StatCounter stated its information takes visitors to and from Bing’s chat under consideration. Right here’s what digital intelligence platform SimilarWeb informed me:
- “It’s attainable that we’re lacking a number of the Bing Chat interactions that use an Edge sidebar / extension, however I don’t know the way 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 exhibits Bing taking market share from Google, however failed to offer any figures.
- “We’ve made extra progress within the final six months than we’ve 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 put up highlighting the variety of chats (1 billion) and pictures created (750 million), in addition to 9 quarters of progress for Edge. And it earned them a stunning quantity of PR due to many publications protecting 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 progress. Right here’s what a SimilarWeb spokesperson informed me:
- “We are able to see somewhat little bit of progress for Bing, but it surely’s incremental. Based on our official rankings for the search engine class, they have been the #2 search engine with somewhat over 2% 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, based on 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 grew to become a race:
