Google's Search market share below 90 percent for the first time in 10 years
Google's dominance appears to be slowly crumbling. For the first time since 2015, more than one in ten internet users are using a search engine besides Google.
(Image: Google/Daniel AJ Sokolov)
Google is synonymous with online search engines and has dominated this market for many years with a market share of over 90%. However, according to the latest statistics, more internet users have recently switched to other search engines than in the last ten years. In the last three months of the previous year, the market leader's market share fell below 90 percent for the first time since the beginning of 2015.
This was reported by Search Engine Land, citing statistics from Statcounter. According to the report, Google's share among search engines used worldwide was consistently below 90 percent in the last quarter of 2024: 89.34 percent in October, 89.99 percent in November and 89.73 percent in December. This is therefore no longer just a one-month outlier; observers are assuming a trend.
A market share of more than 89% can still be described as dominant. Nevertheless, it is remarkable when it extends over a period of three months. This was last the case in the first three months ten years ago. In the months from January to March 2015, Google's search engine market share fluctuated between 89.47 and 89.62 percent. Since then, Google has always reached 90 to 92 percent.
Bing can make gains, pressure on Google increases
One could assume that internet users would have used chatbots and other artificial intelligence models to obtain information. However, the statistics do not show this, as they focus on traditional search engines. According to these statistics, Microsoft's Bing is the second most used internet search with 3.97 percent. Almost exactly one year ago, Bing's market share was three percent, despite the integration of ChatGPT. At Google's expense, Yandex and Yahoo have also made some gains, with recent market shares of 2.56% and 1.29% respectively. Baidu, DuckDuckGo & Co. remain well below one percent.
Google is not only under pressure from competing search engines and AI chatbots, but also politically and legally. Last summer, a US court ruled that Google's search engine business was illegal. The US federal judge called Google a monopolist because the data company had abused its market power, for example in Android smartphones and web browsers, in favor of its search engine business. Google is therefore in breach of US competition law. However, the ruling is not yet legally binding, so it is still unclear what Google will face as a result of its illegal search engine business.
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