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HIGH HOPES —


BING SEARCH SHOWS FEW, IF ANY, SIGNS OF MARKET SHARE INCREASE FROM AI FEATURES


BING'S US AND WORLDWIDE MARKET SHARE IS ABOUT THE SAME AS IT HAS BEEN FOR YEARS.

Andrew Cunningham - 1/18/2024, 10:52 PM

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Microsoft

READER COMMENTS

44

Not quite one year ago, Microsoft announced a "multi-year, multi-billion dollar
investment" in OpenAI, a company that had made waves in 2022 with its ChatGPT
chatbot and DALL-E image creator. The next month, Microsoft announced that it
was integrating a generative AI chatbot into its Bing search engine and Edge
browser, and similar generative AI features were announced for Windows in the
apps formerly known as Microsoft Office, Microsoft Teams, and other products.

Adding AI features to Bing was meant to give it an edge over Google, and reports
indicated that Google was worried enough about it to accelerate its own internal
generative AI efforts. Microsoft announced in March 2023 that Bing surpassed the
100 million monthly active users mark based on interest in Bing Chat and its
ilk; by Microsoft's estimates, each percentage of Google's search market share
that Bing could siphon away was worth as much as $2 billion to Microsoft.


FURTHER READING

Bing Chat is now “Microsoft Copilot” in potentially confusing rebranding move

A year later, it looks like Microsoft's AI efforts may have helped Bing on the
margins, but they haven't meaningfully eroded Google's search market share,
according to Bloomberg. Per Bloomberg's analysis of data from Sensor Tower, Bing
usage had been down around 33 percent year over year just before the AI-powered
features were added, but those numbers had rebounded by the middle of 2023.

Microsoft hasn't given an official update on Bing's monthly active users in
quite a while—we've asked the company for an update, and will share it if we get
one—though Microsoft Chief Marketing Officer Yusuf Medhi told Bloomberg that
"millions and millions of people" were still using the new AI features.

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StatCounter data mostly tells a similar story. According to its data, Google's
worldwide market share is currently in the low 90s, and it has been for
virtually the entire 15-year period for which StatCounter offers data. Bing's
worldwide market share number over the same period has been remarkably stable;
it was about 3.5 percent in the summer of 2009, when what had been known as Live
Search was renamed Bing in the first place, and as of December 2023, it was
still stuck at around 3.4 percent.

Recent US data is slightly more flattering for Microsoft, where Bing's usage
rose from 6.7 percent in December 2022 to 7.7 percent in December 2023. But that
doesn't necessarily suggest any kind of AI-fueled influx in new Bing search
users—usage remained in the mid-to-high 6 percent range through most of 2023
before ticking up right at the end of the year—and Bing's US usage has floated
in that same 6–7 percent zone for most of the last decade.

It even seems like Microsoft is making moves to distance its AI efforts from
Bing a bit. What began as "Bing Chat" or "the new Bing" is now known as Windows
Copilot—both inside Windows 11 and elsewhere. Earlier this week, the Bing Image
Creator became "Image Creator from Designer." Both products still feature Bing
branding prominently—the Copilot screen in Windows 11 still says "with Bing" at
the top of it, and the Image Creator tool is still hosted on the Bing.com
domain. But if these new AI features aren't driving Bing's market share up, then
it makes sense for Microsoft to create room for them to stand on their own.

That's not to say Google's search dominance is assured. Leipzig University
researchers published a study earlier this week (PDF) suggesting Google, Bing,
and the Bing-powered DuckDuckGo had seen "an overall downward trend in text
quality," especially for heavily SEO-optimized categories like purchase
recommendations and product reviews.



READER COMMENTS

44
Andrew Cunningham Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a
focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of
operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and
co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue.

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following the series finale, answers to these mysteries and more await.

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