For more than a decade, Google had a 90 percent share of the search engine market. However, in the last three months of 2024, the company's share fell below 90 percent for the first time. On the other hand, Microsoft's share in this market has doubled.
This information is known in the report of Site Statcount regarding the traffic analysis of the website. According to this report, Google's market share was 89.34 percent in October, 89.99 percent in November and 89.74 percent in December, which is a big change compared to the previous period.
Google shares last fell below 90 percent in early 2015. However, this decline in Google's share has led to a significant increase in usage of Microsoft's Bing search engine in the latter half of 2024. The company's share nearly doubled to nearly 4 percent. This means that Bing is slowly gaining popularity, still significantly behind Google.
The reason for the fall in Google's shares
According to Statcounter data, Google is slowly losing its search market share. While Google's share is relatively stable in most regions, the company has lost the most market share in Asia. It challenged the dominance of the company as a whole.
Last November, Google's share of the search market in the United States reached 90.37 percent, but it fell to 87.39 percent in December. For the remainder of 2024, the share varies between 86 percent-88 percent. Google held more than 90 percent of the shares for a long time. However, the company has recently come under scrutiny due to user dissatisfaction with the performance of search results and allegations of illegal dominance.
A possible reason behind Google's decline in search share is the increasing use of artificial intelligence-based search engines (eg: ChatGPT Search and Perplexity). However, Statcounter's report makes no specific reference to this change. The report mainly contains information on Bing, Yandex, DuckDuckGo and Ecosia.
Microsoft Bing is second in the list of most popular search engines. In the second half of 2024, its market share will reach about 4 percent.
Google's declining market share indicates a change in user behavior.
