As competition in the search market heats up with the advent of generative artificial intelligence (AI), the market share of Google, the world’s largest search engine company, fell slightly, while Microsoft (MS) rose. According to Stat Counter, a global web traffic analysis site, on the 5th, Google’s global search market share as of last April was 90.91%.
This is a drop of about 2 percentage points (1.91 percentage points) from a year ago (92.82%) and 0.47 percentage points lower than last March (91.38%), a month ago. Compared to May of last year (93.11%), which had the highest market share over the past 12 months, it fell by 2.20 percentage points. Although Google still holds more than 90% of the search market share, its dominance has decreased slightly. On the other hand, Microsoft’s search engine Bing’s market share in April was 3.64%, up nearly 1% from a year ago (2.76%).
Yahoo’s search share was 1.13%, unchanged from April last year (1.11%). In the US search market, changes in market share were more evident. Google’s market share in April this year was 86.58%, down 2.3 percentage points from a year ago (88.88%). Most of Google’s decline was absorbed by MS Bing. Microsoft’s market share rose 2 percentage points from 6.43% to 8.24% during the same period, taking one step closer to 10%. Yahoo rose slightly from 2.33% to 2.59%. Since the advent of OpenAI’s ChatGPT,
MS has quickly incorporated it into its search engine, challenging the search market dominated by Google. In addition, in the ‘search antitrust lawsuit’ filed by the U.S. Department of Justice against Google, it is seeking to reorganize the market by defending the government’s claim that Google is illegally dominating the market. MS CEO Satya Nadella appeared as a witness in a trial held in October last year and expressed concern that allowing Google’s illegal monopoly in the search market could strengthen Google’s dominance in the AI market.