Tiago Bianchi
Research expert covering internet & gaming in Latin America and Spain
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A digital Goliath in any terms, Google remains the leading search engine worldwide, holding market shares of more than almost 90 percent across all devices since 2015. It is of course no different in the United States, where Google Search is the fourth most-popular app on mobile devices in the country. The California-based giant has consistently dominated its home market, handling over 60 percent of all search queries in the United States since 2008.Responsible for most of its parent company Alphabet’s earnings, search advertising represents more than 79 percent of Google’s revenues in the U.S., dwarfing the conglomerate’s other businesses like YouTube and Google’s cloud services. Not by chance, the country alone is responsible for generating more than a fourth of the world traffic to its search engine, while Google Sites remain the most visited web properties in the country.
Usage, alternative engines, and competition
Despite mobile devices accounting for over half of the global website traffic, online search on desktop devices remains strong in the United States. This provides other search engines a fairer battlefield for competition across these devices, both nationally and worldwide. Still, Google holds more than 81 percent of the U.S. search market on desktop. Additionally, Google also dominates mobile search, long assured by its home advantage on the Android ecosystem, as well as deals with smartphone manufacturers that position the search platform as the default tool in most devices.Even so, the United States is one of the most diverse markets for online search. Released by Microsoft in 2009, Bing is the closest contender to Google, besides holding a market share of around six percent across all devices in the United States. The challenger’s competition was also strengthened by deals with Verizon Media, the company which hosts Yahoo! and AOL search and web properties. Surprisingly, the United States generates around 26 percent of Bing’s total traffic, second only to China, which is responsible for around 35.25 percent of the engine’s visit share. Meanwhile, alternative search companies like the privacy-focused engine DuckDuckGo find their largest audiences and biggest market reach in the United States.
Search advertising
With search advertising being the pillar behind the search engines’ businesses, the United States remains its most fertile territory to date. The sector remains the most invested medium for digital advertising in the country. The U.S. was responsible for most of the search advertising spending worldwide, moving more than 88 billion U.S. dollars in investments. For matters of comparison, this is more than double the amount invested in China during the same year, even when summing up what was spent in the UK, Japan, and Germany altogether during the same period.Along with this sheer amount, Google represents more than 28 percent of the overall digital advertising revenue generated in the United States. The company’s revenues from search advertising were expected to reach more than 55.6 billion in 2022 and another 62.89 billion in 2024, much more than any other company in the online search segment.
AI enters the game
Despite its power and stable position for more than 20 years, Google showed some of its first signs of weakness over what became the biggest shift in the online search industry in more than a decade. The trend set by chatbots performing online searches in a dialogue format took the market by assault with the release of the groundbreaking ChatGPT by Californian start-up OpenAI. This time, Microsoft was quicker on the draw and managed to integrate the functionalities of ChatGPT into a new version of Bing search. At the start of the race, Google scrambled with a troubled release of its own AI tool named Bard, although the company is currently working on a series of AI-powered search tools under the codename Magi.Being the world’s largest online search market, the AI-enhanced search trend has sparked the interest of U.S. customers. Although showing mixed feelings of curiosity and wariness regarding the ability of AI-powered search tools to provide unbiased and truthful results, Americans point preferences for safe and easy search engines that integrate with their digital environment. Still, less than half of them look forward to engines that use AI to improve results, showing that the trend needs more time to solidify as a standard across the sector.
