Bing was able to steal a lot of market share from Google in the last months of 2023. The search engine continues to lag behind worldwide.

Today, Bloomberg headlines that the market share of the search engine Bing will have increased little or not at all in 2023, despite the addition of all AI functions. This conclusion is based on numbers from Sensor Tower. ITdaily took a closer look at Statcounter’s figures for the Belgian market, which paint a different picture of Bing’s growth.

Bing stagnated at five to 5.5 percent for a long time, but made a significant jump to almost eighteen percent in November and December. Among desktop users, the proportion is as high as 37 percent. The search engine appears to be more than averagely popular in Belgium because if we zoom out on the figures for Europe and worldwide, Bing doesn’t exceed four percent and there is little to no growth, Bloomberg has found.

Microsoft itself is rather sparse when it comes to passing on user numbers. The last update dates back to March 2023, when Microsoft proudly announced that Bing had reached one hundred million active users. Since then, Microsoft prefers to refer to the number of conversations conducted with Bing Chat. There are already more than a billion.

Google remains dominant

Despite the fact that Bing is doing well in Belgium, Microsoft must also conclude that Google’s position remains unaffected. In our country, Google still has an eighty percent market share and the search engine is unrivaled, especially in the mobile market. According to Statcounter, Google itself has a global market share of more than ninety percent. Bing has suffered the same fate as Microsoft’s Edge browser, which also cannot step out of Chrome’s shadow.

It’s been almost a year since Microsoft introduced Bing Chat. By expanding the search engine to include generative AI, Microsoft hopes to have a shock effect in the search industry. We can now say that this did not work, also because Google reacted quickly and also added AI functions to its search engine.