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.

"Clima" weather was the most probed query in the Google search engine in Brazil in 2024, indexing at 100 in terms of search volume. Compared to the top ranking search result, the weather forecast-related terms "Tempo" and "Previsão do tempo" were also some of the most searched terms on the engine, scoring index values of 77 and 28. Additionally, the messenger solution "WhatsApp" and "WhatsApp Web" scored relative index values of 78 and 59 each.

In 2025, “Google” was the most searched term on Google worldwide. “YouTube” ranked second, recording an index value of 79 points. That same year, “ChatGPT” and “GPT” entered the ranking for the first time, with index values of 27 and 18 points, respectively.

According to Cognitive Market Research, the global search engine optimization services market size was estimated at USD 45.2 billion in 2022 and will increase at a 17.90% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2023 to 2030. Key Dynamics of Search Engine Optimization Services Market

Key Drivers of Search Engine Optimization Services Market

Evolving Digital Business Environment: As companies grow their online presence, the importance of SEO for visibility, traffic, and conversions becomes paramount. Organizations are focusing on improving their organic search rankings to lessen reliance on paid advertisements and enhance long-term ROI, which is driving the global demand for professional SEO services.

Rising Mobile and Voice Search Trends: The increase in mobile internet users and the prevalence of voice-activated devices have redirected SEO strategies towards mobile-first indexing and conversational keyword approaches. SEO providers are progressively offering mobile optimization, schema markup, and enhancements for local search to adapt to changing user behaviors.

Content-Focused Marketing Approaches: Companies are making significant investments in content marketing, which aligns closely with SEO objectives. High-quality, optimized content enhances search visibility and fosters user engagement. This synergy between SEO and content strategy serves as a vital growth catalyst for service providers.

Key Restrains for Search Engine Optimization Services Market

Regular Search Algorithm Modifications: Frequent changes to algorithms by Google and other search engines render SEO unpredictable. Service providers must consistently adjust their strategies, while businesses often face challenges with declining rankings and variable performance, which can hinder long-term commitments to SEO.

Fierce Competition and Market Saturation: The SEO sector is extremely competitive, with numerous providers delivering similar services. Price competition and variations in quality can create confusion for clients and diminish trust in service results, particularly for small businesses.

Prolonged ROI and Measurement Difficulties: The outcomes of SEO efforts typically require time to materialize, and assessing direct ROI can be complicated. Many businesses prefer faster digital avenues such as paid advertising, perceiving SEO as a long-term and uncertain investment, especially when financial resources are constrained.

Key Trends in Search Engine Optimization Services Market

AI and Automation in SEO: AI-driven tools are enhancing keyword research, content optimization, and technical audits. Automation enables SEO agencies to efficiently scale their services, while businesses are increasingly utilizing AI to improve real-time SEO decision-making and forecasting.

E-E-A-T and Quality Content Emphasis: Search engines are progressively rewarding content that adheres to the standards of Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T). SEO agencies are now focusing on credibility, author biographies, and transparent sourcing to comply with Google's quality guidelines.

Rise of Local and Hyperlocal SEO: As "near me" searches continue to rise, businesses are taking advantage of local SEO services to feature in regional search results. Optimizing Google My Business, creating location-specific content, and managing reviews are key factors driving the demand for geo-targeted SEO campaigns.

Impact of COVID–19 on the Search Engine Optimisation Services Market

Nearly every business on the planet has suffered setbacks due to the pandemic. This is because numerous preventative lockdowns and other worldwide limitations imposed by regulatory bodies have seriously hampered each company's manufacturing and supply chain operations. The market for search engine optimization services globally is not an exception. Additionally, because this epidemic has negatively influenced most people's finances, people are now more concerned with cutting back on their discretionary spending, which has decreased consumer demand. These variables will impact the global search engine optimization services market's revenue trajectory during the forecast period. However, the global search engine optimization services industry is projected to recover as regional regulatory authorities start to loosen these imposed limits. Introduction of Search Engine Optimization Services

The search ...

In February 2025, Verizon Media processed **** million online search queries in the United States, and market leader Google processed over **** million search queries. In total, Google accounted for ** percent of the U.S. desktop search queries. Google was also the leading mobile search provider in the United States, accounting for around ** percent of the market as of March 2024.

Between January 1st and December 31st, 2024, "Wetter" (Weather) was the most popular search query on the Google search engine in Germany. "Google" was ranked second, reaching an index point value of only 50 relative to the top search query ("Wetter").

This is a test collection for passage and document retrieval, produced in the TREC 2023 Deep Learning track. The Deep Learning Track studies information retrieval in a large training data regime. This is the case where the number of training queries with at least one positive label is at least in the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands or more. This corresponds to real-world scenarios such as training based on click logs and training based on labels from shallow pools (such as the pooling in the TREC Million Query Track or the evaluation of search engines based on early precision).Certain machine learning based methods, such as methods based on deep learning are known to require very large datasets for training. Lack of such large scale datasets has been a limitation for developing such methods for common information retrieval tasks, such as document ranking. The Deep Learning Track organized in the previous years aimed at providing large scale datasets to TREC, and create a focused research effort with a rigorous blind evaluation of ranker for the passage ranking and document ranking tasks.Similar to the previous years, one of the main goals of the track in 2022 is to study what methods work best when a large amount of training data is available. For example, do the same methods that work on small data also work on large data? How much do methods improve when given more training data? What external data and models can be brought in to bear in this scenario, and how useful is it to combine full supervision with other forms of supervision?The collection contains 12 million web pages, 138 million passages from those web pages, search queries, and relevance judgments for the queries.

As of April 2022, Google was ranked first of the leading mobile search engines in Denmark, holding over ** percent of the market shares. All other search engines followed far behind, altogether representing less than *** percent of the country's mobile search market shares as of the examined month.

We asked Dominican consumers about "Most used search engines by brand" and found that "Google" takes the top spot, while "WebCrawler" is at the other end of the ranking.These results are based on a representative online survey conducted in 2022 among ***** consumers in the Dominican Republic. Statista Consumer Insights offer you exclusive market research results from over ** countries and territories worldwide.

README These datasets and R script are to generate the visualizations used in "Search Engine Manipulation: SEO to Spread Kremlin-Aligned Disinformation"

DATA

Data were collected from the Ahrefs (ahrefs.com) dashboard on Feb 21, 2022. Any re-use of this data must cite Ahrefs as the source. We provide two data files:
1) ora_backlinks.csv (referring domain network extracted from Ahrefs) 2) ora_keyphrases.csv (keyword network extracted from Ahrefs) ora_rd.csv contains:

'source' : (think tank domain)
'target' : (backlinking domain)
'weight' : (total # of backlinks)
'network' : (ru_tt_rd = Russia, us_tt_rd = US, ds_rd = Pseudo)

ora_keyphrases.csv contains:

source: think tank domain target: top key phrases position: Google's ranking for that domain for that term volume: ahrefs estimated organic daily traffic group: Think tank group

R Script This script generates visuals of top backlinkers and backlink recipients in the think tank network. It also constructs and visualizes the minimum overlap network for referring domains present in the paper. This code was created using R version 4.1.1 (2021-08-10) -- "Kick Things". To run this code, you'll first need to install the libraries at the beginning of the script. Once that is done, open the script and modify the path to the input file (ora_rd.csv): rd_data_el and modify the path to the output file: output_dir. The script can then be run line-by-line in Rstudio or by typing Rscript SEM_visuals.R in the terminal after setting paths.

Citation How to cite (will be updated upon acceptance):

 Williams, E. M. & Carley, M. C., (2023). Search Engine Manipulation to Spread Pro-Kremlin Propaganda. Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) Misinformation Review, Volume #(Issue #). Received: Month Xth, 2022. Accepted: Month Xth, 20XX. Published: Month Xth, 2022.
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We asked Indonesian consumers about "Most used search engines by brand" and found that "Google" takes the top spot, while "WebCrawler" is at the other end of the ranking.These results are based on a representative online survey conducted in 2022 among ***** consumers in Indonesia. Statista Consumer Insights offer you exclusive market research results from over ** countries and territories worldwide.

We asked French consumers about "Most used search engines by brand" and found that ******** takes the top spot, while ************ is at the other end of the ranking.These results are based on a representative online survey conducted in 2025 among 2,754 consumers in France.

We asked Morrocan consumers about "Most used search engines by brand" and found that "Google" takes the top spot, while "Ecosia" is at the other end of the ranking.These results are based on a representative online survey conducted in 2022 among ***** consumers in Morocco. Statista Consumer Insights offer you exclusive market research results from over ** countries and territories worldwide.

Google was by far the most used search engine in Germany, holding a market share of ***** percent in May 2025. Bing ranked second, with a market share of approximately **** percent in the same month, followed by Yandex, DuckDuckGo, and Yahoo!, with shares of **** percent, **** percent and **** percent.

We asked Egyptian consumers about "Most used search engines by brand" and found that "Google" takes the top spot, while "WebCrawler" is at the other end of the ranking.These results are based on a representative online survey conducted in 2022 among ***** consumers in Egypt. Statista Consumer Insights offer you exclusive market research results from over ** countries and territories worldwide.

We asked Nigerian consumers about "Most used search engines by brand" and found that "Google" takes the top spot, while "Ecosia" is at the other end of the ranking.These results are based on a representative online survey conducted in 2022 among ***** consumers in Nigeria. Statista Consumer Insights offer you exclusive market research results from over ** countries and territories worldwide.

We asked Turkish consumers about "Most used search engines by brand" and found that "Google" takes the top spot, while "WebCrawler" is at the other end of the ranking.These results are based on a representative online survey conducted in 2022 among 1,046 consumers in Turkey. Statista Consumer Insights offer you exclusive market research results from over 50 countries and territories worldwide.

We asked Danish consumers about "Most used search engines by brand" and found that "Google" takes the top spot, while "Yandex" is at the other end of the ranking.These results are based on a representative online survey conducted in 2022 among ***** consumers in Denmark. Statista Consumer Insights offer you exclusive market research results from over ** countries and territories worldwide.

Market leader Facebook was the first social network to surpass one billion registered accounts and currently sits at more than three billion monthly active users. Meta Platforms owns four of the biggest social media platforms, all with more than one billion monthly active users each: Facebook (core platform), WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram. In the third quarter of 2023, Facebook reported around four billion monthly core Family product users. The United States and China account for the most high-profile social platforms Most top ranked social networks with more than 100 million users originated in the United States, but services like Chinese social networks WeChat, QQ or video sharing app Douyin have also garnered mainstream appeal in their respective regions due to local context and content. Douyin’s popularity has led to the platform releasing an international version of its network: a little app called TikTok. How many people use social media? The leading social networks are usually available in multiple languages and enable users to connect with friends or people across geographical, political, or economic borders. In 2025, social networking sites are estimated to reach 5.42 billion users and these figures are still expected to grow as mobile device usage and mobile social networks increasingly gain traction in previously underserved markets.

As of June 2022, Google was the most popular web property in Italy. The search engine had around ** million monthly visitors, ranking ahead of social network Facebook with ** million and Amazon websites with approximately ** million monthly visitors, respectively.