Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wanted to make Google dance two years ago, with an AI overhaul of Bing that was designed to steal Google’s all-important search market share. Now, there are plenty of signs that Microsoft has successfully taken search share off Google, both in the US and worldwide.
Earlier this week Microsoft reported that its search and news advertising revenue had grown by $1.6 billion, or 13 percent, over the last fiscal year. Excluding traffic acquisition costs, revenue had increased by 20 percent thanks to “higher search volume and higher revenue per search.”
That higher search volume has been persistent for more than a year now, and Jordi Ribas, head of search at Microsoft, revealed on X this week that it has also had an impact on overall desktop search market share. According to Comscore, Bing now has 29 percent of US search share, compared to around 60 percent for Google. That’s a 2.1 percentage point increase since the launch of Bing Chat in February 2023.
StatCounter says Bing has increased its worldwide search share to 11.6 percent, a 3.4 percentage point increase from two years ago. At the same time, both Comscore and StatCounter report that Google’s search share has declined. Google has lost 6.1 percentage points worldwide, and in the US it has lost 1.2 percentage points.
These might seem like small shifts, but they could be worth billions to Bing just as Microsoft becomes a $4 trillion company. “For every 1 point of share gain in the search advertising market, it’s a $2 billion revenue opportunity for our advertising business,” said Philippe Ockenden, Microsoft’s CVP of finance, during the launch of Bing Chat two years ago.
When you look at the overall search market share — which includes desktop, mobile, and tablet devices — Bing isn’t taking as much share off Google. StatCounter notes that Bing is only at 4 percent worldwide across all platforms, compared to Google’s nearly 90 percent share. That could mean Microsoft’s tricks to convince people to keep using Bing and Edge on Windows are having a bigger impact on search engine share than its mobile efforts.
Microsoft’s search and advertising business is still small compared to Google, but it has certainly made Google dance and respond with its new AI overviews and dedicated AI mode in search. Bing has been slowly growing and taking away share from Google and other competitors just as Microsoft had planned. “This is now the fourth consecutive year in which Bing and Edge took market share,” says Ribas. “We’re also growing thanks to powering web grounding for third-party leading chatbots including ChatGPT and Meta AI.”
Microsoft has now refocused most of its AI efforts around Copilot rather than Bing search, despite its search engine quickly hitting 100 million active users weeks after the launch of its AI-powered Bing Chat feature. Microsoft rebranded Bing Chat to Copilot months after its debut, in a bid to better compete with ChatGPT and other standalone AI chatbots.
