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Google accounted for 89.94% of worldwide search engine share in StatCounter’s September 2026 all-platform snapshot. Google separately said in May 2025 that it handled more than 5 trillion searches annually. Those figures measure different things: the first is a share estimate, while the second is Google’s company-reported search volume. Studies of Google users also suggest that AI summaries can affect clicks, but observed rates depend on the sample and query type.
Worldwide search engine market share in September 2026
StatCounter’s September 2026 worldwide, all-platform snapshot puts Google at 89.94% and Bing at 5.29%. These are StatCounter’s market-share estimates, not a census or absolute count of every search query. The figures describe a worldwide blend across platforms; they do not show any one country’s or device type’s share.
| Search engine | Worldwide share, all platforms |
|---|---|
| 89.94% | |
| Bing | 5.29% |
| Yahoo! | 1.36% |
| Yandex | 1.30% |
| DuckDuckGo | 0.74% |
| Baidu | 0.44% |
Source: StatCounter Global Stats, worldwide search engine market share, September 2026. StatCounter provides separate views by platform, region and historical period, so a different selection can produce different shares. A worldwide figure also obscures country-level variation: Yandex and Baidu, for example, can lead in Russia and China respectively, even though their worldwide shares are much smaller.
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How many searches does Google handle?
Google said on May 21, 2025, “We already see more than 5 trillion searches on Google annually.” That is Google’s own statement, not an independently verified measurement, and the cited page does not provide a method or comparable figures for other engines. It is also not a separate 2026 total. Google’s May 2025 publication is the source for the figure.
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That annual statement should not be confused with market share or with the number of visits to Google.com. Nor does it establish comparable current query volumes for Bing, Yahoo!, Yandex, DuckDuckGo or Baidu. Search-share estimates, absolute query counts and website traffic use different measures and cannot be substituted for one another.
How often do Google AI summaries appear?
There is no single prevalence rate that applies to all searches. The estimate changes with the query mix, date, collection method and definition of an AI summary.
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| Study and sample | Observed AI summary prevalence | How to interpret it |
|---|---|---|
| Pew Research Center: 68,879 unique Google searches from a tracked panel of 900 U.S. adults, March 1–31, 2025; results scraped April 7–17, 2025 | About 18% | Observed in this U.S. panel’s Google searches, not all searches or all engines |
| Haofei Xu, Umar Iqbal and Jacob M. Montgomery: 55,393 trending queries across 19 topics, March 13–April 21, 2026; 2026 preprint | 13.7% overall; 64.7% of question-form queries | A trending-query sample; question-form queries had a substantially higher rate than the sample overall |
Pew’s July 22, 2025 analysis is available at Pew Research Center. The later query study is a preprint, not a universal measurement: Measuring Google AI Overviews: Activation, Source Quality, Claim Fidelity, and Publisher Impact. The preprint also reports that 11.0% of the atomic claims it examined were unsupported by the cited pages. That finding is specific to the authors’ analyzed claims and does not establish an error rate for every AI Overview.
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1Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problems2Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitches3Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsDo people click links when Google shows an AI summary?
In Pew Research Center’s study of U.S. browsing activity in March 2025, traditional search result links were clicked in 8% of visits when a Google AI summary appeared, compared with 15% of visits without a summary. A link within the summary itself was clicked in 1% of visits where a summary appeared.
These are observed click rates for Google searches by the tracked U.S. panel, not a universal click-through rate or proof that the summary alone caused the difference. The study does not establish the same behavior in other countries, on other search engines or under later versions of Google’s results. Its measure of clicks on traditional results is also distinct from clicks on links inside the AI summary.
Google’s account of website clicks
Google’s internal analysis presents a different measure and perspective. On August 6, 2025, Liz Reid, Google’s VP and Head of Search, wrote that “Overall, total organic click volume from Google Search to websites has been relatively stable year-over-year.” The post also says Google was sending “slightly more quality clicks to websites than a year ago.” These are Google’s own claims about its aggregate traffic, rather than an independent study of individual visits with and without summaries. Google’s August 2025 post does not make the company’s internal measure interchangeable with Pew’s panel results.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Why website traffic statistics are not search statistics
Traffic-share figures can help compare the reach of popular web domains, but they do not measure search engine query share or total search volume. For example, DataReportal relays Similarweb estimates for traffic across the top 10,000 domains:
| Measured period | Google.com share of traffic to top 10,000 domains | ChatGPT.com share of traffic to top 10,000 domains |
|---|---|---|
| June 1–August 31, 2025 | 19.56% | 1.33% |
| December 1, 2025–February 28, 2026 | 19.79% | 1.32% |
These are domain-traffic shares for the stated periods, not the percentage of searches performed on Google or the share of queries answered by ChatGPT. DataReportal’s Digital 2026 Mid-Year Global Update Report attributes the figures to Similarweb.
Quick Recap
How to read search statistics without mixing them up
- Search market share: a percentage estimate for a specified source, geography, platform and period, such as StatCounter’s worldwide all-platform September 2026 snapshot.
- Search volume: an absolute number of searches over a stated period. Google’s more-than-5-trillion figure is a company-reported annual statement from May 2025.
- AI-summary prevalence: the proportion of a particular study’s collected searches that showed a summary. Query mix and study design matter, as the Pew and 2026 preprint estimates illustrate.
- Click behavior: clicks observed under a particular study’s conditions; it is not the same denominator as market share or summary prevalence.
- Website traffic share: a web-analytics measure of visits or traffic to domains, not search queries.
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