Search market share

StatCounter's panel put Google at 91.1% of global search engine referrals in August 2026, with Bing on 4.5%, Yahoo on 1.23%, Yandex on 0.99%, DuckDuckGo on 0.7% and Baidu on 0.62%^[1]. The gap between Google and every other engine has been wide enough for long enough that month-to-month movement in the tail is mostly panel noise.

The picture is device-dependent. In the same month Google took 86.05% of worldwide desktop searches, where Bing held 8.84%^[4], against 95.59% of mobile searches, where Bing held 0.6%^[5]. Bing's share sits almost entirely on desktop, which is worth holding in mind when reading any Bing and Copilot figure quoted without a device split.

Usage figures for AI platforms are self-reported and measured on different meters, so they sit beside the search shares rather than inside them. OpenAI said in February 2026 that ChatGPT had more than 900 million weekly active users and more than 50 million consumer subscribers^[2]. Google said in mid-2025 that its AI search experiences served more than 1.5 billion users a month^[6], a count that includes AI Overviews shown to ordinary search users rather than a separate audience. Perplexity handled 780 million queries in May 2025 on its chief executive's account^[7].

Visits to AI search platforms rose from 15.6 billion in the first quarter of 2025 to 27.4 billion in the first quarter of 2026, while Google Search visits grew 2.4% across the same window^[3]. The source calls that a 42.8% rise, which its own two counts do not give, so the absolute figures are the usable part. Growth rates that far apart still leave a large absolute gap. Similarweb research discussed by SparkToro in June 2026 put conventional search engines at roughly a hundred times more used than AI tools as the starting point of a consumer's information journey, from survey answers rather than measured traffic^[8], so the shift visible in zero-click and referral data is not yet a shift in where people begin.

Within generative AI traffic the leader is losing ground. ChatGPT's share of worldwide generative-AI web traffic fell from roughly 76% in 2025 to roughly 53% in 2026, with Gemini taking much of the difference^[9].

The figures above carry dates because they move quickly and because the sources measure different quantities. StatCounter counts referrals observed on a panel of tracked sites, not queries^[1]. Similarweb counts visits to a domain, which treats one AI chat session and one search visit as a single unit each^[3]. Vendor user totals are company announcements rather than audited measurements^[2]. A percentage taken from one of these and set against a percentage from another describes nothing, which is why visibility measurement for a single brand is done by sampling prompts rather than by apportioning market share.