Being the first to market with an AI product doesn’t necessarily mean you will beat your competition. Since the launch of the new AI-driven Bing in February 2023, Bing’s share of the global search engine market has moved a little more than half a percentage point, according to data from market research firm Statcounter.
In that same time period, Google’s share of the market moved down 2.08% to 91.62%.
Bing, which is built on OpenAI’s technology, uses AI to not just give users links but also to provide answers to questions. Last October, the image generator Dall-e was also integrated into the search engine, allowing users to create images in the chat interface of the site.
But Microsoft’s efforts haven’t done much to fuel Bing’s growth beyond the single digits. Part of the reason the search engine never gained popularity was that by the time it launched in 2009, Google search, with a decade head start, had already become synonymous with searching the internet.
How Bing fits into Microsoft’s AI plans
Microsoft has said it doesn’t necessarily need to change the entire search game to be successful. Adding one point of search share translates to $2 billion of revenue for Microsoft, according to the company.
When asked whether Bing’s AI lift had increased market share as much as he wanted, Microsoft’s chief consumer officer Yusuf Mehdi told Quartz that since the launch, the company has had millions of new people try it out. The search engine has 100 million daily active users now, he said.
“We’re very happy with how generative AI has helped accelerate Bing. We’ve grown share we grew share last month I believe we’re gonna grow share again this month,” Mehdi said in an interview last week. “Frankly, it’s what’s allowed us to now build Copilot. ... I would say, it’s been a great point of progress.”
With Bing, Microsoft has taken what it’s learned from how people are using the AI-driven search engine to apply to the Copilot brand and product. Microsoft disclosed in October that it has more than one million paid subscribers to its AI assistant.
AI may not have done much for Microsoft to disrupt the search market, but the technology seems to have made the tech giant cool again. It even briefly overtook Apple as the world’s most valuable company last week.