The tech giant's market share is being challenged by an increasingly crowded field
Google $GOOGL has been the world’s most popular search engine since its launch in 1997. In October, it was holding a market share of 91.6%, according to web analytics tracker StatCounter. That’s down nearly 80 basis points from a year before, though a relatively small dent considering OpenAI’s ChatGPT was introduced late last year.
But it’s in web traffic where hints can be found that rivals are gaining ground.
Bing traffic increased 8% in October to 42.7 million visitors, while ChatGPT saw a 4% bump up in traffic to 55 million visitors compared to the previous month—representing 2% of Google’s web traffic, an increase from 1.6% in September.
Google’s chatbot AI Bard gained 2% in web traffic, to 8.7 million visitors, while Google search’s web traffic ticked down 0.4% to 2.8 billion.
Google app global downloads are still trending upwards with a 6% increase during October to 11.8 million downloads, according to Sensor Tower data cited in a Bank of America $BAC (BofA) analyst note. And the Bing app jumped 41% to 7.3 million. But it’s ChatGPT which is getting the attention—its downloads increased 7% to 17.2 million compared to the previous month. The spike in traffic may be due to schools being back in session, BofA said.
This may all change by the end of this year. Google is expected to launch its highly anticipated new large language model (LLM) Gemini. And as Google integrates more generative artificial intelligence into its search engine, it probably won’t be worried about its competitors anytime soon.
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