Tiago Bianchi
Research expert covering internet & gaming in Latin America and Spain
Get in touch with us nowGoogle’s flagship position
Despite bumps and earthquakes experienced throughout the world, Google’s trajectory in the United Kingdom remains on the up. Even when experiencing dips in its market share twice since 2015 and feeling the hits of several European Union’s antitrust fines against the company, its search engine remained comfortable as the top player in the country, holding roughly 90 percent of the industry’s market across all devices since 2015, even more on mobile devices.Second to Google in the United Kingdom is Microsoft’s Bing, with a much smaller but relatively successful market share of almost four percent. However, other search engines also manage to attract larger audiences across the country: Yahoo! remains the third most-visited engine in the UK, while DuckDuckGo and Ecosia also have here some of their biggest shares of overall audiences. On the other hand, the Russian engine Yandex still didn’t seem to catch the interest of users in Great Britain, despite its growth in the European search market.
How do the British use search engines?
Although search engines are part of daily life, consumers in Great Britain remain critical when using them: most users in the country believed that the accuracy of their results largely depended on the website itself, while only around a fourth of them believed that the information listed on them would be truthful. Even fewer respondents fully trusted the search results, with around a fifth of these same users not knowing where funding for these web portals came from.Despite concerning matters of fake news in the country, most British internet users continue to employ these tools for their personal information, with Google search being the website where British internet users most spend time on. Meanwhile, its public-funded broadcast service, the BBC, “weather” and “news” are some of the most searched queries on Google in the country.
Search advertising in the UK
Apart from information and news consumption, search engines also play an important role for British users when it comes to shopping. Around 60 percent of consumers in the United Kingdom used these tools when deciding which purchases to make, while only 37 percent relied on customer reviews. Meanwhile, consumer electronics, household appliances, and clothing were some of the most online searched products by the British public.This provides not only a promising field for digital advertising in general: with spendings verging around 13.14 billion GBP 293943 in 2022, search engine advertising represents most of the sector’s revenues in the United Kingdom, outstripping social media, banner, video, and classifieds. Particularly in the case of the UK, most investments in search advertisement prioritize desktop devices, despite the growth of mobile devices for such activities. After skyrocketing in 2021, investments in the sector were expected to grow around 11.7 percent in 2022 and 6.2 percent in 2023.
