Tiago Bianchi
Research expert covering internet & gaming in Latin America and Spain
Bing - statistics & facts
Bing has reentered the arena. The search engine’s trajectory is inevitably told alongside other companies, be it by its parent company, or the several deals the platform needed to close to oppose its main competitor. Despite the strong hand of Microsoft behind its operations, Bing still seems like a minor player in the global online search market, monopolized for more than a decade by Google. However, the rise of AI-powered search trend has been turning point for the online search industry, providing Bing with a chance for more time in the spotlight, again powered by partnerships and experiments with chatbot functionalities in the web search realm.
Conversely, Bing's partnership with OpenAI has been characterized by ambiguity. While Microsoft has invested in and partnered with OpenAI, both companies have released AI products that are similar and have worked to improve their own features. Yet, despite its recent integration with Copilot (formerly Bing Chat) and other attempts at new search functionalities, Bing as an engine continues to elicit more skepticism than curiosity from users in the US and abroad, in contrast to emerging search engines. Just as comparisons between AI-powered search engines become more common, OpenAI progressively seeks independence from Microsoft, even joining forces with the company's biggest rival in a possible agreement with Google Cloud .
Amid worries and dubious agreements among competitors, changes to the search landscape are, so far, Bing's greatest chance to get ahead in the industry. Even though its market share has grown among traditional search engines, Bing still generates only smaller shares of traffic among other AI search engines. The tables are for once turning against Google, the issue of whether Bing will be able to challenge its Nemesis' long-running dominance remains to be seen.
The main alternative
Bing is widely recognized as the main search alternative to Google, holding a global search market share of around four percent across all devices. Achieving a record-high share of ten percent on desktops, Microsoft recently expanded its reach. But even when being the second most remembered search brand across several markets, Bing faces a relative rejection compared to Google, which maintains its position as the default search engine on mobile devices through partnerships with manufacturers.Where is Bing most used?
Bing is most accepted in its home market, the United States, which accounts for a quarter of its worldwide online traffic. As of 2024, it processes more than four million explicit core search queries monthly, powered by Microsoft Websites in the country. It also repeats a similar performance in its biggest markets, such as Europe and the United Kingdom. Surprisingly, most of Bing's global traffic comes from China, where almost 30 percent of all visits to its website come from. There, the engine competes directly with the domestic leader Baidu, thus demonstrating how things can change in a major market without Google as the dominant player.Bing’s shared history
Bing was launched in 2009 as a rebranding of Microsoft’s earlier MSN and Live Search engines. Poised to replace Yahoo!, Bing started powering most of the engine’s searches and gradually doing the same for other tools, from old-timers like AOL to newer solutions like DuckDuckGo and Ecosia. After ChatGPT was released in November 2022, Bing allied with OpenAI in a deal where the startup provided its chatbot service while Bing turned into its staple search engine for the new software. This maneuver rendered Bing a surge in global traffic, as Microsoft reached its highest search advertising revenue to date.Conversely, Bing's partnership with OpenAI has been characterized by ambiguity. While Microsoft has invested in and partnered with OpenAI, both companies have released AI products that are similar and have worked to improve their own features. Yet, despite its recent integration with Copilot (formerly Bing Chat) and other attempts at new search functionalities, Bing as an engine continues to elicit more skepticism than curiosity from users in the US and abroad, in contrast to emerging search engines. Just as comparisons between AI-powered search engines become more common, OpenAI progressively seeks independence from Microsoft, even joining forces with the company's biggest rival in a possible agreement with Google Cloud .
Amid worries and dubious agreements among competitors, changes to the search landscape are, so far, Bing's greatest chance to get ahead in the industry. Even though its market share has grown among traditional search engines, Bing still generates only smaller shares of traffic among other AI search engines. The tables are for once turning against Google, the issue of whether Bing will be able to challenge its Nemesis' long-running dominance remains to be seen.
