At Google, we have to follow the line like a hawk. Statcounter recorded a market share of the search engine below 90% during the last three months of last year: 89.34% in October, 89.99% in November, and 89.73% in December. This is obviously still huge, but this shift is symbolic, since Google has been above this threshold since 2015.
Google under pressure
We will see if the downward trend continues at the beginning of the year, but the decline at the end of 2024 is not a good omen for the web giant. Because bad news has been piling up in recent months, between problems in court (the American authorities are demanding the sale of Chrome) and regulators trying to rebalance the market to boost competition.
Also according to StatCounter, Bing, Yandex and Yahoo have benefited from Google's decline, particularly Bing, whose market share hovered around 4% during the last 5 months of the year. Above all, the online search sector is starting to open up to other players, particularly AI bots. It is also unusual to see that young Internet users are increasingly using tools like ChatGPT to find out more about current events or ask all sorts of questions.
We can now better understand why Google is pressing so hard on the accelerator to impose AI Overviews, these responses generated by AI. Which is not without raising a reliability issue, because these responses can sometimes tell nonsense...
Source: Search Engine Land
0 Comments