Bing AI is incredibly popular – but Microsoft will still never overtake Google

It’s definitely been the year of AI and we don’t expect things to slow down any time soon. Microsoft unveiled its new version of Bing, enhanced and integrated with ChatGPT, and the excitement and frenzy around the relaunch was inescapable. 

Meanwhile, Google released its own competitor, Google Bard, though with less successful results. In fact, we actually saw a shift in share price temporarily in favor of Bing, and Google’s dominance in the search engine market was threatened – something that was once thought unimaginable. However, it looks like Bing may struggle to hold its own and keep hold of its new-found
Windows Central has delved into the statistics and found that Bing, despite its current popularity, hasn’t actually made a dent in Google’s overall market share.

The stats in question come from the aptly-named Stat Counter,  a service that tracks browser market share, and as you can see below, Google still retains a sizable lead,  and Bing is still well… there. Windows Central points out that Bing’s market share hovers at just 2.5% but hasn’t increased in a meaningful way, even after the release of Bing Chat. That doesn’t mean generative AI content has low interest, however.

(Image credit: Stat Counter)

For example, ChatGPT racked up millions of users quicker than Instagram and even TikTok. It’s been used by people in every corner of the internet for a plethora of things, even if it does make us nervous about the job market in the next few years, what with the bot scraping the web for content and regurgitating it as its own.

Statista is another analytics firm that paints a slightly better picture for Bing’s adoption in recent years, but again not by much. The graph below shows that while it has been picking up towards Google over the past few years, it does suggest that Bing has actually lost market share against Google in the last few months.

(Image credit: Statista)

So far it seems like Google will continue to reign supreme in the search engine sphere. Google has a simple, familiar user interface and an entrenched presence in users’ minds that makes it the first choice when people want to search for almost anything.

It will take a lot of ground for Microsoft’s Bing to get anywhere close to the popularity and market dominance of Google’s search engine. Microsoft is going all-in on AI services and systems, and is clearly investing a lot of time and money into baking ChatGPT into its products, so we will have to see just how fruitful these efforts will be. Until then, we’re probably going to keep using Google, if only to hop onto ChatGPT.