As of March 2025, Google represented 79.1 percent of the global online search engine market on desktop devices. Despite being much ahead of its competitors, this represents the lowest share ever recorded by the search engine in these devices for over two decades. Meanwhile, its long-time competitor Bing accounted for 12.21 percent, as tools like Yahoo and Yandex held shares of over 2.9 percent each. Google and the global search market Ever since the introduction of Google Search in 1997, the company has dominated the search engine market, while the shares of all other tools has been rather lopsided. The majority of Google revenues are generated through advertising. Its parent corporation, Alphabet, was one of the biggest internet companies worldwide as of 2024, with a market capitalization of 2.02 trillion U.S. dollars. The company has also expanded its services to mail, productivity tools, enterprise products, mobile devices, and other ventures. As a result, Google earned one of the highest tech company revenues in 2024 with roughly 348.16 billion U.S. dollars. Search engine usage in different countries Google is the most frequently used search engine worldwide. But in some countries, its alternatives are leading or competing with it to some extent. As of the last quarter of 2023, more than 63 percent of internet users in Russia used Yandex, whereas Google users represented little over 33 percent. Meanwhile, Baidu was the most used search engine in China, despite a strong decrease in the percentage of internet users in the country accessing it. In other countries, like Japan and Mexico, people tend to use Yahoo along with Google. By the end of 2024, nearly half of the respondents in Japan said that they had used Yahoo in the past four weeks. In the same year, over 21 percent of users in Mexico said they used Yahoo.

Google dominated the Egyptian web traffic. As of November 2022, close to 97.5 percent of the web traffic was referred via this search engine. Bing was its closest competitor, with only 1.5 percent. Yahoo! came in third place, with a share of almost 0.3 percent.

As of March 2025, Google continued to dominate the global search engine industry by far, with an 89.62 percent market share. However, this stronghold may be showing signs of erosion, with its share across all devices dipping to its lowest point in over two decades. Bing, Google's closest competitor, currently holds a market share of 4.01 percent across, while Russia-based Yandex hikes to the third place with a share of around 2.51 percent. Competitive landscape and regional variations While Google's overall dominance persists, other search engines carve out niches in various markets and platforms. Bing holds a 12.21 percent market share across desktop devices worldwide, as Yandex and Baidu have found success inside and outside of their home markets. Yandex is used by over 63 percent of Russian internet users, but Baidu has seen its market share significantly in China As regional variations highlight the importance of local players in challenging Google's global supremacy, the company is likely to face more challenges with the AI-powered online search trend and increasing regulatory scrutiny. Search behavior and antitrust concerns Despite facing more competition, Google remains deeply ingrained in users' online habits. In 2024, "Google" itself was the most popular search query on its own platform, followed by "YouTube" - another Google-owned property. This self-reinforcing ecosystem has drawn scrutiny from regulators, with the European Commission imposing millionaire antitrust fines on the company. As its influence extends beyond search into various online services, the company's market position continues to be a subject of debate among industry watchdogs and authorities worldwide.

Google is not only popular in its home country but is also the dominant internet search provider in many major online markets, frequently generating between 70 and 80 percent of desktop search traffic. The search engine giant has a market share of over 90 percent in India and accounted for the majority of the global search engine market, ahead of other competitors such as Yahoo, Bing, Yandex, and Baidu. Google’s online dominance All roads lead to Rome, or if you are browsing the internet, all roads lead to Google. It is hard to imagine an online experience without the online behemoth, as the company offers a wide range of online products and services that all seamlessly integrate with each other. Google search and advertising are the core products of the company, accounting for the vast majority of the company revenues. When adding this up with the Chrome browser, Gmail, Google Maps, YouTube, Google’s ownership of the Android mobile operating system, and various other consumer and enterprise services, Google is basically a one-stop shop for online needs. Google anti-trust rulings However, Google’s dominance of the search market is not always welcome and is keenly watched by authorities and industry watchdogs – since 2017, the EU commission has fined Google over 8 billion euros in antitrust fines for abusing its monopoly in online advertising. In March 2019, European Commission found that Google violated antitrust regulations by imposing contractual restrictions on third-party websites in order to make them less competitive and fined the company 1.5 billion euros.

The majority of the Egyptian web traffic was conducted through Google Chrome. As of November 2022, over 80 percent of the traffic online was via that browser. Safari ranked second, with only around 8.4 percent of the web traffic. The remaining web browsers had a share of below three percent each.

In January 2024, users who reached Reddit.com from links displayed after launching a research on search engines like Google or Yahoo generated over 4.6 billion visits. Between April 2022 and January 2024, search traffic volumes to Reddit experienced a positive trend.

In March 2024, search platform Google.com generated approximately 85.5 billion visits, down from 87 billion platform visits in October 2023. Google is a global search platform and one of the biggest online companies worldwide.

In the six months ending March 2024, the United States accounted for 26.95 percent of traffic to the online search website Google.com. India was ranked second, accounting for 4.52 percent of web visits to the platform, with Brazil coming in third place with 4.35 percent.

In 2025, Google was the most used search engine in Morocco, accounting for nearly 97 percent of the web traffic. The next most used search engine was Bing, which made up over two percent of web traffic in Morocco. The number of people using the internet in Morocco stood at 35.3 million in 2025, the fifth highest amount of internet users in Africa.

As of December 2022, the United States represented 79.32 percent of the global visitor share to the microblogging platform Parler.com. Countries like Sweden and the United Kingdom each represented a share of 3.67 percent and 2.83 percent, while other countries amassed represented 10.25 percent of the network's global push. The previous month, Parler had global visitor traffic of around 1.2 million users, almost half of its 2.3 million visitors of September, when the platform was reinstated in the Google Play Store.

Mobile accounts for approximately half of web traffic worldwide. In the last quarter of 2024, mobile devices (excluding tablets) generated 62.54 percent of global website traffic. Mobiles and smartphones consistently hoovered around the 50 percent mark since the beginning of 2017, before surpassing it in 2020. Mobile traffic Due to low infrastructure and financial restraints, many emerging digital markets skipped the desktop internet phase entirely and moved straight onto mobile internet via smartphone and tablet devices. India is a prime example of a market with a significant mobile-first online population. Other countries with a significant share of mobile internet traffic include Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya. In most African markets, mobile accounts for more than half of the web traffic. By contrast, mobile only makes up around 45.49 percent of online traffic in the United States. Mobile usage The most popular mobile internet activities worldwide include watching movies or videos online, e-mail usage and accessing social media. Apps are a very popular way to watch video on the go and the most-downloaded entertainment apps in the Apple App Store are Netflix, Tencent Video and Amazon Prime Video.

Between June 2022 and March 2023, the traffic volume for the keyword "AI" has tripled, going from around 7.9 million monthly searches to more than 30.4 million during the last month of the measured period. General interest in artificial intelligence (AI) has exploded in markets like the United States by the end of 2022. Likewise, interest for the application programming interfaces (API's) and plugins of artificial intelligence solutions, especially those of ChatGPT, has also seen a major increase since the release of the tool in November of 2022.

The artificial intelligence market

Valued at around 142.3 billion U.S. dollars in 2022, the artificial intelligence market is one the most promising tech segments for the rest of the decade, with more than five billion U.S. dollars invested in startups - the most notable being the Californian company OpenAI and its flagship application ChatGPT. Disruptive as it is, the adoption of AI has already sparked an alert for several industries, likely to affect job markets and thus raising concerns about cybercrime and other online misdeeds.

The future of online search?

Of most industries, the impact of the new tool developed by OpenAI may be felt by the online search market like a global earthquake. With chatbots providing search results in a dialogue format, the trend of AI-powered search engines unleashed by ChatGPT threw giant companies like Google and Microsoft into a race with startups and other competitors to present the best candidate for this disruptive (and experimental) online solution.

96.99 percent of search engine referrals in Qatar in November 2022 was through Google. 2.37 percent of the referrals in the same period was through Bing.

In November 2024, the website with the highest reach on PCs in South Korea was naver.com, as around 77.4 percent of computer users in the country accessed that site. Naver.com is the search portal website of South Korean internet giant Naver Corporation, offering multiple services from social media, shopping, and blogs to search engines and more. Naver as a search engine Naver generated most of its revenue in 2022 from its function as an internet search platform. Naver’s biggest competitor in the online search market was Google. The domain google.com had a website reach on PCs around the mid-40 percent mark, but overall Google as a search engine effortlessly claimed the highest market share on the search engine market in South Korea. Still, looking at the number of monthly users, Naver was the most used search engine among consumers.  Internet usage in South Korea In general, the South Korean population is very well connected to the internet, as over 97 percent had access to it as of 2021. Accordingly, internet usage in the country has thoroughly expanded into various aspects of the average person’s day-to-day life. Additionally, the government also continues to push further development of utilizing the internet.

In November 2024, Google.com was the most popular website worldwide with 136 billion average monthly visits. The online platform has held the top spot as the most popular website since June 2010, when it pulled ahead of Yahoo into first place. Second-ranked YouTube generated more than 72.8 billion monthly visits in the measured period. The internet leaders: search, social, and e-commerce Social networks, search engines, and e-commerce websites shape the online experience as we know it. While Google leads the global online search market by far, YouTube and Facebook have become the world’s most popular websites for user generated content, solidifying Alphabet’s and Meta’s leadership over the online landscape. Meanwhile, websites such as Amazon and eBay generate millions in profits from the sale and distribution of goods, making the e-market sector an integral part of the global retail scene. What is next for online content? Powering social media and websites like Reddit and Wikipedia, user-generated content keeps moving the internet’s engines. However, the rise of generative artificial intelligence will bring significant changes to how online content is produced and handled. ChatGPT is already transforming how online search is performed, and news of Google's 2024 deal for licensing Reddit content to train large language models (LLMs) signal that the internet is likely to go through a new revolution. While AI's impact on the online market might bring both opportunities and challenges, effective content management will remain crucial for profitability on the web.

In April 2025, Google accounted for over 94 percent of the mobile search market in the United States. With approximately 66 percent reach among mobile audiences, Google Search is also one of the most popular mobile apps in the United States. DuckDuckGo and Yahoo! followed as the leading mobile search providers in the United States during the last examined month, with shares of around 2.1 percent each.

In 2022, Wordle was the most popular Google search in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Spain. By contrast, in Germany and Italy, Ukraine was the most popular search on Google. In Brazil, Google users were interested the most in the 2022 elections.

Wordle!

Launched in October 2021 and purchased by the New York Times in January 2022, Wordle is an online game where players can play only once a day and have to guess a five-letter word in six tries. The game became an instant hit, with a surge of daily users at the beginning of the year. For instance, it was one of the most popular iPhone apps in the United States, being played mostly by millennials. Also in the United Kingdom, the game gained in popularity, with most players using the app every day.

Google search

As the leading search engine in many countries, Google is the most visited multi-platform web property. Indeed, most of Google's revenues come from Google properties, which include the search platform, the traffic generated by search distribution partners using Google.com as their default search in browsers, and the advertising on its own sites.

In 2023, Google's ad revenue amounted to 264.59 billion U.S. dollars. The company generates advertising revenue through its Google Ads platform, which enables advertisers to display ads, product listings and service offerings across Google’s extensive ad network (properties, partner sites, and apps) to web users. Google advertising Advertising accounts for the majority of Google’s revenue, which amounted to a total of 305.63 billion U.S. dollars in 2023. The majority of Google's advertising revenue comes from search advertising. Google market share These revenue figures come as no surprise, as Google accounts for the majority of the online and mobile search market worldwide. As of September 2023, Google was responsible for more than 84 percent of global desktop search traffic. The company holds a market share of more than 80 percent in a wide range of digital markets, having little to no domestic competition in many of them. China, Russia, and to a certain extent, Japan, are some of the few notable exceptions, where local products are more preferred.

In Turkey, google.com was the leading website between December 2022 and November 2023, with more than 1.9 billion monthly visits. The search engine was also popular with its Turkish domain, google.com.tr, reaching 120 million monthly visits and placing ninth in the ranking. Additionally, YouTube.com and Twitter.com (now called "X") became the second and third most visited websites in the country.

As of early Februray 2022, about 54 percent of internet users across the world visited google.com right before visiting wechat.com. Another 15 percent of traffic came from qq.com. WeChat is the most popular messenger and social media in China, offering a wide range of functions such as mobile payment and e-commerce.