Decisions Made with Data.

Search Engine Market Share

//  by //  Leave a Comment

Updated January 11, 2023

Reading Time: 2 minutes
search engine market share is like a piece of the pie

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.

Download SEO Content Template now

Name(Required)
Privacy(Required)
Stay Informed
This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Read More

In this Free eBook:

    • Easy to use checklist
    • Use SEO best practices
    • Optimize pages & blog posts

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)?

About Alyson Harrold

Alyson is Co-CEO and Chief Storyteller. Prior to forming the agency, her career spanned media (NBC-TV affiliates and city magazine, international ad agency) and positions like C-Suite financial services marketer and digital marketing consultant. Alyson learned how the right medium with the right message can attract the right audience. With her team, Alyson helps brands have meaningful customer interactions. Now she teaches those lessons—among others—as a UC Berkeley Extension instructor in her SEO and Digital Marketing courses since 2014. Alyson shares her knowledge as a speaker at preeminent digital marketing conferences around the country like Digital Growth Unleashed and more.

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *