Bing's search market share grew less than 1 per cent despite ChatGPT integration

Microsoft's Bing search engine, which integrated ChatGPT's generative AI technology in February 2022, increased its global search market share by only 0.8 percentage points by the end of the year.

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While the new version of Bing caught users' attention with AI's conversational answers to queries, these changes weren't enough to significantly boost the search engine's competitiveness.

According to StatCounter, it has a 3.4 per cent share at the end of 2023, up from 2.6 per cent in January. By comparison, Google still has more than 90% of the search market.

However, the ChatGPT integration has helped stem the decline in Bing's popularity, which was down 33% year-over-year in previous months. In the second quarter of 2023, the number of monthly active users in the US more than doubled year-on-year to 3.1 million, according to SensorTower's analysis of mobile app data. By the end of the year, that number had risen to 4.4 million.

Overall, users began spending 84% more time on the search engine. In addition, Microsoft continues to add new AI tools to the search engine, which attracts users.

However, experts believe that "high-profile" features alone are not enough to make Bing a full-fledged competitor to Google. This requires accumulating a critical mass of search queries and data to train the algorithms, and this may take a lot of time.

Source: Bloomberg