Google Search has been the industry leader in search for years, but it appears to be losing ground as rivals improve and the reputation of Search deteriorates. Furthermore, it seems that Google Search has had its lowest market share in ten years.

Over the past three months, Google’s market share in the global search engine industry has fallen below 90 percent, a clear trend that SearchEngineLand was the first to notice. It was not until early 2015 that Google’s share fell below this figure for three months.

StatCounter, which analyses monitoring data from millions of websites to identify trends in search engine usage, device usage, and other areas, is the source of the data. Although there is a pattern in this instance, the data is not impervious to errors, as we most certainly observed with recent Google Pixel statistics.

Google’s market share in October 2024 was 89.34 percent, in November it was 89.99 percent, and in December it was 89.73 percent, the data states. This last occurred in March 2015, when it dropped to 89.52 percent. Additionally, it decreased in January (89.62 percent) and February (89.47 percent) that year.

According to the data, all of this occurs at a time when Google has been under fire for almost two years because of the increasing unhelpfulness of its search results, even if a US court has contested its monopoly status because it has maintained a steady 90 to 92 per cent market share for almost ten years.

End of Search?

There are probably many causes at work, but heightened competition is probably one of them. The flourishing of generative AI has given rise to new search services like Perplexity and even ChatGPT from OpenAI.

It’s possible that users who cared about their privacy switched to other search engines. StatCounter doesn't offer much information there other than indicating that Google decreased while Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex all saw very minor growth (still varying).

Reports say TikTok has increasingly become the preferred place for search, particularly among younger viewers. TikTok even experimented with integrating Google Search into its app which seems to have worked its way to these users.