Search Engine Market Share

Updated March 3, 2025

Any Alternatives to Google?

Understanding (and leveraging) search engine market share is the basis for SEO. Are there really any viable alternatives to Google? In the post, we’ll explore market share stats for both desktop and mobile searches.

Desktop Dominance

comScore releases search engine market share stats every year. According to the latest report, Yahoo has a measly 12.4% share of online searches, which shows it has rallied a little in recent years, with it previously as low as 9%. The same is also true of Bing who, while making some gains, has less than 25%.

Regardless of which study you use, Google is the dominant player for desktop searches. comStock reports 64% search engine market share for Google. Bing is a distant second or with Yahoo in third. But will it always be this way?

Search Engine Market Share Mobile Stats

With mobile device usage continually on the rise, how is Google competing on the small screen? According to NetMarketShare, Google dominates the mobile device market for search… nearly 97%.  Note: this is real-time data with no sampling. Unlike comScore and Conductor, they use a sampling model to report their search engine market share stats.

Not included in either comScore or Conductor monthly reports is YouTube. Owned by Google, YouTube has more than a billion users. 40% of global viewers use mobile devices.

Interesting… Now What?!

While there are alternatives with regard to search, Google remains the overwhelmingly dominant player. That means that if you want to play online via organic SEO, you must abide by their rules. That means online marketers must:

• Know Google quality guidelines
• Insist that Webmasters follow the rules
• Respect their human audience by publishing useful and quality content
• Leverage video content for search
• Monitor your website’s stats with regard to search engine type and mobile device access numbers

Are you surprised at any of these search engine market share statistics? If so, which one(s)?