Despite Microsoft’s Best Efforts, Bing Doesn’t Seem To Gain Market Share In The Past Year
Despite Microsoft’s Best Efforts, Bing Doesn’t Seem To Gain Market Share In The Past Year
For a short while, Bing was the biggest topic in town as Microsoft’s search engine gained AI capabilities courtesy of OpenAI, the company behind the popular ChatGPT chatbot. However, statistics suggest that even such a drastic change of nature for the search engine barely made a dent in Google’s near-complete domination in the search engine market.
Here’s some important context: at the time, Bing’s new capabilities had alerted Google so much so that it initiated the “Code Red” response, which signifies a direct threat to its businesses. Microsoft at the time also claimed that for each percentage of market share it could scrape off from Google, it would convert to effectively $2 billion worth of revenue to the Redmond-based company.
According to Bloomberg, the analysis of data originating from Sensor Tower indicates that YoY usage was down 33% before the introduction of Bing Chat; however, the introduction has only managed to recoup the losses by mid-2023. To that end, the company told Bloomberg that “millions and millions of people” were using the AI features. Both StatCounter and US-based data indicate no significant change in the market share figures, with 3.4% globally and 7.7% in the US as of December 2023.
It’s worth noting that Microsoft may have chosen to avoid the Bing name in its AI services, which has since gone through a rebrand into ‘Copilot’ for most of its platforms. For most people, the Bing stigma could be real – and associating AI with it may end up hurting the Copilot’s perception, especially when Google is arming its Bard AI in a race to penetrate the internet as quickly as possible.
Source: Ars Technica
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