Search Engine Market Share United Kingdom
I have already seen some creative people publishing search engines and Google statistics for 2022. Obviously, as we are a few days into 2022, there is no such thing. We cannot have statistics for some period in the future. And a few days or weeks of 2022 are not statistically significant.
We can and will look at the 2021 Search Engine Market Share in the United Kingdom. With a breakdown by search engine and also by device type. I also include some statistics for Worldwide, Europe and USA, as these are the most relevant stats for anyone based in the UK.
The most staggering figure is actually one of stagnation and little change in 2021 compared with previous years going back a decade or two. The next one is that Google has consistently a 90% or more market share in all the segments below. The only exception is the desktop market in the UK with only 84%. Where Bing has over 10%. Probably all the Microsoft employees and a few “privacy refugees”, a trend in the past few years.
A note about this data from Statcounter, Statista, Similarweb and NetMarketShare, please read about their methodologies at the bottom. The main differences being Statcounter and Statista use the same data from Statcounter, which counts Hits. NetMarketShare uses data from Google Analytics and essentially counts sessions.
If you Google “Search Engine Market Share” most posts that cover it, including some proclaimed to be the “ultimate guides” and such, have little to no explanation about the data sources or their methodologies. I have attempted to clarify this and how the sources used in this article measure their data.
| 92.83% | |
| Bing | 4.29% |
| Yahoo | 1.51% |
| DuckDuckGo | 0.85% |
| Ecosia | 0.32% |
| Yandex | 0.1% |
Source: https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/united-kingdom/2021
Desktop Search Engine Market Share UK
Despite the rise in privacy concerns, myself included. Google shows no sign of losing its grip on the search market share monopoly.
Apart from Bing and Yahoo, the old rivals, on the privacy front we now have DuckDuckGo with over 1% (all of it) on the desktop market share.
Ecosia at 0.59%. Did you know they plant trees every time you use their search engine?
| 84.25% | |
| Bing | 10.82% |
| Yahoo | 2.84% |
| DuckDuckGo | 1.17% |
| Ecosia | 0.59% |
| Yandex | 0.13% |
Source: https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/desktop/united-kingdom
Mobile Search Engine Market Share UK
Below I also look at the mobile vs desktop market share. This is important in particular to SEO and natural search since Google now uses primarily the mobile version of pages to rank them. This is called the mobile-first index.
This trend is also present worldwide, in Europe and the USA. Google has over 90% of the market share. Although, for Worldwide figures, I have a section on Baidu and China as it seems China is not included in the Statcounter worldwide figures.
The key takeaway here is that you should ensure that your site is not only mobile-friendly but also has fast page load speeds on mobile devices and slow networks.
Not only that, but it should also have good Core Web Vitals. If you are a technical person you will surely have heard of this by now. Hopefully. For the laypersons amongst you, this refers to and measures site speed and a variety of other User Experience (UX) factors. These will affect the ratio of users that convert or take the actions you want them to take.
| 97.46% | |
| Yahoo | 0.87% |
| DuckDuckGo | 0.72% |
| Bing | 0.58% |
| Ecosia | 0.22% |
| Yandex | 0.09% |
Source: https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/mobile/united-kingdom
Tablet Search Engine Market Share UK
There are only 5% of tablet users, in comparison with desktop or mobile but here as well, the trend continues with Google at 92.39%.
| 97.46% | |
| Bing | 5.82% |
| Yahoo | 0.1% |
| DuckDuckGo | 0.63% |
| Ecosia | 0.07% |
| Yandex | 0.04% |
Source: https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/tablet/united-kingdom
Desktop vs Mobile vs Tablet Market Share UK
Tablets aside, the split in both desktop and mobile is almost evenly distributed. This has been so for years as well according to Statcounter and Statista data.
Source: https://gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share/desktop-mobile-tablet/united-kingdom
UK Search Engine Market Share Infographic
Below you have a handy A4 infographic with these stats which you are more than welcome to use. Please keep the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License attribution.
UK Search Engine Market Share 2021 [Infographic]
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License
Embed UK Search Market Share Infographic
Even better, I made this super easy for you. All you have to do is to copy the code below et voila! Oh and paste it somewhere of course. Feel free to change the code to fit your needs.
<a href="https://pedromatias.co.uk/uk-search-engine-statistics/"><img style="width:100%;" src="https://pedromatias.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Search-Engine-Market-Share-United-Kingdom-Pedro-Matias-Infographic.jpg"></a><br><a href="https://pedromatias.co.uk/uk-search-engine-statistics/">UK Search Engine Market Share 2021 [Infographic] </a><br><a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/">Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License</a>
Desktop Search Engine Market Share Europe
The desktop trend for Europe is similar to the UK. Europeans use Google as much as the UK. No Brexit impact here at all!
| 85.68% | |
| Bing | 8.119% |
| Yandex | 2.24% |
| Yahoo | 1.87% |
| DuckDuckGo | 0.83% |
| Ecosia | 0.56% |
https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/desktop/europe/2021
Mobile Search Engine Market Share Europe
The mobile trend for Europe is also about the same as in the UK.
| 97.03% | |
| Yandex | 1.09% |
| Bing | 0.56% |
| DuckDuckGo | 0.42% |
| Yahoo | 0.39% |
| Ecosia | 0.26% |
Source: https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/mobile/europe/2021
Desktop Search Engine Market Share USA
The desktop trend for the USA is higher than in the UK. With Google at 87% of market share.
| 87.57% | |
| Bing | 6.31% |
| Yahoo | 3.25% |
| DuckDuckGo | 2.5% |
| Ecosia | 0.1% |
| Yandex | 0.1% |
Source: https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/desktop/united-states-of-america/2021
Mobile Search Engine Market Share USA
The Mobile trend for the USA is lower than in the UK. With Google at 93% of market share.
| 93.87% | |
| Yahoo | 2.31% |
| DuckDuckGo | 2.26% |
| Bing | 1.33% |
| Yandex | 0.08% |
| Ecosia | 0.06% |
Source: https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/mobile/united-states-of-america/2021
Search Engine Market Share Worldwide 2021
Worldwide Google has 91.94% of the market share. Followed by Bing, Yahoo and then Baidu in that order. Here I am using numbers for the aggregate of all platforms, that is mobile, desktop and tablet.
Something else that became evident or apparent when researching this is that neither Statcounter, Statista or Similarweb appear to include China in the Global figures.
Netmarketshare.com does count China and with that data, Google’s market share is about 80% and Baidu somewhere around 13% to 18%.
More on this below. I have actually asked Statcounter for clarification but had no reply.
| 91.94% | |
| Bing | 2.86% |
| Yahoo | 1.5% |
| Baidu | 1.37% |
| Yandex | 1.1% |
| DuckDuckGo | 0.67% |
Source: https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/worldwide/2021
Mobile Search Engine Market Share Worldwide 2021
With this data, which I’m now fairly certain excludes China and by proxy any Baidu usage within China. Google has 94.87%.
| 94.87% | |
| Baidu | 1.81% |
| Yandex | 0.97% |
| Yahoo | 0.85% |
| Bing | 0.59% |
| DuckDuckGo | 0.5% |
Source: https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/tablet/worldwide
Desktop vs Mobile Market Share Worldwide 2021
Worldwide the usage of mobile vs desktop is significantly higher than in the UK at 54.86% for mobile. 42.65% for desktop and 2.49% for tablet.
SEMrush Mobile vs Desktop Study: Key Findings
Some related findings from SEMrush in early 2021 are relevant specifically to SEO and the mobile vs desktop paradigm.
- Search traffic surged by 22% in 2020 compared to 2019 for the 1,000 most visited websites in the world.
- 66% of all site visits came from mobile devices in that time.
- Bounce rates were higher and total times on site were shorter on both mobile and desktop, indicating that user engagement is growing increasingly difficult to achieve.
- Only 17% of websites retained their positions across both mobile and desktop SERPs, and 37% of URLs were actually thrown out of the top-10 when the search query was made from a mobile device.
Source: https://www.semrush.com/blog/mobile-vs-desktop/
Worldwide Desktop Search Market Share 2010 to 2021
Statista, which uses data from Statcounter, argues that Google has maintained around 90% of its market share since 1997. However, that is without China, where Google left from in 2010.
Global Market Share of Search Engines 2010-2021
Ever since the introduction of Google Search in 1997, the worldwide market share of all search engines has been rather lopsided. Google has dominated the search engine market, maintaining a 92.47 percent market share as of June 2021.
Source:https://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-market-share-of-search-engines/
Baidu in China vs Percentage of Worldwide Search Engine Market Share
Baidu has 85% of the Chinese market share with Google at 2.93%, having pulled out of China in 2010 as many of you will remember or know.
Source:https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/china
How Many People use Internet in China
Around 4.5 Billion worldwide use the internet. As a rough calculation 800.000.000 use Baidu in China. That is 80% or so of the billion that uses the internet there.
4.5B / 800.000.000. That would be about 18% of the global share belongs to Baidu. Again I believe it is not included in the Statcounter data.
For Similarweb which we will look at further below, it shows clearly in their interactive map that china data is not used to arrive a the same figure of about 90% for Google worldwide.
NetMarketShare Mobile Search Engine Market Share Worldwide 2019/2020 with Baidu
Here we are looking at figures up to October 2020, as some changes in browsers broke their methodology. They also use Sessions instead of Hits by Statcounter.
The mobile data including China has over 90% as well.
After 14 years of service and being used as a primary source in tens of thousands of articles and publications, we are retiring NetMarketShare in its current form.
Why? An upcoming change in browsers (https://github.com/WICG/ua-client-hints) will break our device detection technology and will cause inaccuracies for a long period of time.
https://www.netmarketshare.com
| 93.96% | |
| Baidu | 3.55% |
| Yahoo | 0.73% |
| Bing | 0.66% |
| Yandex | 0.58% |
| DuckDuckGo | 0.23% |
| Naver | 0.18% |
| Ecosia | 0.16% |
| Ask | 0.12% |
| Daum | 0.02% |
NetMarketShare Desktop Search Engine Market Share Worldwide 2019/2020 with Baidu
On Desktop with NetMarketShare data, we have Google with just under 70% followed by Bing at 13.31% and Baidu with 12.53%. This is still not the 18% or so of Baidu worldwide if data from china was included above in Statcounter. However, is probably a much closer reflection of the true numbers. It is probably safe to assume these numbers have been going up in China since 2019/20.
| 69.80% | |
| Bing | 13.31% |
| Baidu | 12.53% |
| Yahoo! | 2.11% |
| Yandex | 1.19% |
| DuckDuckGo | 0.43% |
| Ask | 0.18% |
| Naver | 0.16% |
| Ecosia | 0.12% |
| AOL | 0.05% |
Similarweb Search Engine Usage December 2021
Similarweb clearly shows in their interactive map, that data from China, as well as a number of African countries with no significant statical volume, are not used to arrive a the same figure of about 90% for Google worldwide.
This traffic and engagement data is based on aggregated and anonymized first-party analytics shared with Similarweb by millions of websites and apps and represents more than 500 billion pageviews. This data is for a subset of sites and as a result, is an estimation of the market share.
https://www.similarweb.com/engines/
Notes on Data from Statcounter and Statista
The data from links to Statista is based on Statcounter data. Statcounter uses hits and not visitors. NetMarketShare uses sessions.
We provide independent, unbiased stats on internet usage trends. We do not collate our stats with any other information sources. No artificial weightings are used. We remove bot activity and make a small adjustment to our browser stats for prerendering in Google Chrome. Aside from those adjustments, we publish the data as we record it.
https://gs.statcounter.com/faq#methodology
Statista GmbH (Hamburg) collects and aggregates data from multiple public and private sector sources, including ACTA, AWA, Euromonitor, Gfk, Outfit, Scarborough, Simmons, Target Group Index and VUMA. Statista also publishes industry reports, market forecasts and ‘top-lists’ of sectoral statistics.
https://www.eui.eu/Research/Library/ResearchGuides/Economics/Statistics/DataPortal/Statista
We collect data from the browsers of site visitors to our exclusive on-demand network of analytics and social bookmarking products. We count sessions to our network sites, which are defined as a user active on a site with no more than a 30 minute inactive period. A user can have multiple sessions per day.
https://www.netmarketshare.com/methodology
Final Toughts
Google has the same monopoly in 2021 in the UK and the West as it ever had. These figures are estimates and some methodologies may be more accurate than others.
According to Wikipedia referencing Statcounter’s own FAQ. “No artificial weightings are used to correct for sampling bias, thus the numbers in the statistics can not be considered to be representative samples.“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StatCounter
For SEO specifically, the next time your SEO agency or consultant mentions submitting your site to hundreds of search engines. It is best to roll your eyes and nod in agreement. There is a hand full that require attention and to most small to medium size business, any SEO you do for Google will be just fine for Bing, Yahoo and others and chances are the traffic from these sources is small or negligible.
For 2022, Google is where the focus of SEO work should be and growing. The importance of Mobile traffic also continues to grow.
Do you have any thoughts, critiques or questions? Share them below 👇
