Search Engine Market Share 2026: Global Data Report

Worldwide Search Engine Share

Google accounted for 91.02% of search-engine referrals worldwide in August 2026, according to StatCounter. Bing was second at 4.55%, followed by Yahoo! at 1.24%, Yandex at 1.01%, DuckDuckGo at 0.70% and Baidu at 0.62%.

StatCounter counts page views that search engines send to the websites it tracks, not the searches people run. Its FAQ is explicit on this point: the figures are search engine referrals, not the number of searches performed. On that measure, Google's share has held between 89.3% and 91.6% every month since January 2024, and its Q1 2026 average (89.91%) was almost identical to Q1 2025 (89.87%).

Desktop Search

Bing's share is mostly on desktop. It had 8.91% of desktop referrals worldwide in August 2026, compared with 0.60% on mobile. In the United States, Bing had 14.20% of desktop referrals in March 2026.

StatCounter's desktop figures move more than its all-device figures: Google's desktop share rose from 81.32% to 85.94% between August 2025 and August 2026, while Bing's fell from 10.60% to 8.91%. Treat year-on-year changes of this size as indicative rather than exact.

Mobile Search

On mobile, Google had 95.55% of search-engine referrals worldwide in August 2026. No other search engine reached 1%: Yandex was second at 0.92%, followed by Baidu, DuckDuckGo, Bing and Yahoo!.

Share by Continent

Google leads on every continent. Its share is highest in Africa (95.67%) and lowest in North America (86.17%), where Bing takes about 9% of referrals.

Share by Country

Four markets stand apart. Baidu leads in China and Yandex in Russia, Naver runs close to Google in South Korea, and Bing takes more than a quarter of referrals in Japan. The Czech Republic still has a sizeable local search engine, Seznam, at 15.79%.

Country figures are more volatile than the worldwide total, especially in China, so compare several months before drawing conclusions.

Markets That Moved

Three markets have changed sharply since January 2025. In Japan, Bing's share of referrals was 7.63% in August 2025, rose to a peak of 36.41% in April 2026, and was 28.47% in August 2026.

Baidu's monthly share in China moved between 44.64% and 63.97% from January 2025 to August 2026, and Naver and Google swapped the lead in South Korea three times over the same period. StatCounter's data shows these swings but not their causes.

AI Platforms: Referrals and Crawling

AI chatbots still send far less traffic to websites than search engines. StatCounter's Google-versus-ChatGPT comparison gave ChatGPT 0.24% of their combined referrals in August 2026. On US federal government websites, chatgpt.com sent 1.81% of all visits in the 30 days to September 20, 2026, against 26.41% from Google organic search.

Among AI chatbots, ChatGPT sends most of the referrals, at 79.40% in August 2026. Cloudflare's 2025 data shows the other side of the exchange: AI platforms' crawlers request far more HTML pages than the platforms refer back to sites.

How Other Datasets Compare

Cloudflare's view of referrals across its network in 2025 puts Google at nearly 90% and Bing at 3.1%, broadly in line with StatCounter's worldwide figures. Both show Bing much stronger on desktop, and Cloudflare puts it at about 14% on Windows. For Russia, Cloudflare puts Yandex at 65%; Yandex's own Yandex Radar gave 66.4% for Q4 2024.

What the Companies Report

Search companies mostly publish usage and revenue figures rather than market share. Google's official volume figure, stated in May 2025, is more than 5 trillion searches a year. Microsoft says Bing has gained share for five straight years but gives no share figure. Baidu's results report users and revenue, and Yandex's report revenue; Yandex's own share figure (66.4% in Russia, Q4 2024) appears on its company page and is listed in the previous section.

What It Means for SEO Teams

For most sites, Google is still where search traffic comes from, and optimizing for Google comes first. Bing matters more than its worldwide share suggests if your audience uses desktop computers, especially Windows, or is in the United States or Japan.

Local engines deserve a separate plan in China, Russia, South Korea and the Czech Republic. AI chatbot referrals are still small: Similarweb estimates they more than doubled in the year to May 2026, while StatCounter's ChatGPT share of Google and ChatGPT referrals fell from 0.37% in March 2026 to 0.24% in August 2026. Track them as their own channel in analytics, alongside organic search. Our agentic SEO work covers both.

Widely Quoted Figures, Checked

Several search engine statistics circulate with out-of-date numbers or no source at all. Here are common ones, checked against the data on this page (to August 2026).

Sources

Every figure on this page comes from one of the sources below, grouped by who published them.