How Goes the Battle, Bing?

A little over a year ago - on February 7, 2023, to be exact - Microsoft announced the incorporation of artificial intelligence into its Bing search engine. Search engine marketers everywhere went a bit nuts, this one included. I signed up. I waited. I got accepted! I downloaded the Edge browser. I started searching with Bing. And then… I went back to Google. Sigh. Old habits, as they say.

But I’ve been wondering. Has Bing been successful? Have they taken search engine market share from Google? I took a quick trip to Statcounter.com to do some checking. Worldwide, across devices, Google had a 93.37% search engine market share in February, 2023. A year later, that’s down to 91.61%. So a drop of 1.76 points over the 12 month period. My reaction: zzzzzzzzzz. Seriously though, I’m sure every single point matters, to someone somewhere, but I HAVE to believe Bing was hoping for greater impact than that. During the same time frame, Bing’s global market share went from 2.81% to 3.32%. Hey, that’s an 18% improvement! That’s good, right? Keep that up for 10 years and you’ve got something.

Bing’s global search engine market share has gone from 2.81% to 3.32% since its AI announcement.

Do a little digging, however, and the picture gets rosier for Bing. If you focus on US desktop searches, Bing’s share has gone from 13.06% to 17.09% in that year, a 31% gain. Now we’re talking. And intuitively that makes sense, given Microsoft’s strength in the business space. Google’s share of that segment dropped from 80.79% to 76.5%. Yes, still dominant. (I have seen not a single advertiser penny shift from Google Ads to Bing in the past year. Which reminds me, I need to check MSFT’s advertising revenue at some point.)

Bing’s US desktop search market share has grown from 13.06% to 17.09%, a 31% gain.

Is market share the whole story? No. I’m confident Bing has a plethora of internal metrics showing better user engagement, higher satisfaction, etc. Cause for celebration, certainly. But market share has to be one of the critical success metrics. And in the lucrative US desktop market, central to many B2B advertisers, Bing has started to (micro)chip away.

So, the judges’ scorecard for round 1 has Bing doing minor damage to Google with its left jab. One has to wonder if Google is actually eyeing other opponents with even greater trepidation (Perplexity?) as it sits on the stool and readies for round 2. There is one certainty here: the fight has just begun.