Google Search Statistics 2026: Market Share, AI Overviews and Query Volume

Google held 90.39% of all-device search market share in May 2026, per StatCounter Global Stats; Google also confirmed it now handles more than 5 trillion searches a year, the first official update since 2016. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has since disclosed AI Overviews user counts in quarterly earnings, and Pew Research Center has measured how those summaries reshape click-through behavior. In the same year, AI Mode crossed the billion-user threshold and query length tripled inside Google’s own results page.

Key Takeaways

• Google’s all-device search share was 90.39% worldwide in May 2026, with Bing second at 5.03% and Yahoo! third at 1.4%.
• Google Search and other advertising revenue reached $198.08 billion in fiscal year 2024, 13% above 2023 and 56.6% of Alphabet’s $350.0 billion consolidated revenue.
• AI Mode in Google Search surpassed a billion monthly active users by May 2026, roughly one year after launch, with queries more than doubling each quarter.
• AI Overviews reached 2 billion monthly users by Q2 2025, up from 1.5 billion the prior quarter, and is available in over 200 countries and 40 languages.
• Pew Research found that a traditional search-result link was clicked on only 8% of visits where an AI summary appeared, compared with 15% of visits that showed no AI summary.
• Google disclosed more than 5 trillion searches per year as of March 2025, implying roughly 13.7 billion queries per day across global properties.
• Searches starting with “Tell me about” rose approximately 70% year over year in 2025, and queries starting with “How do I” reached an all-time high with a 25% annual increase.

Editor’s Choice

• Google all-device search market share, May 2026: 90.39% (StatCounter).
• Google mobile search market share, May 2026: 95.52% (StatCounter).
• Google desktop search market share, May 2026: 84.49% (StatCounter).
• Google Search and other advertising revenue, FY2024: $198.08 billion (Alphabet 10-K).
• Annual Google search volume confirmed by Google: more than 5 trillion queries per year as of March 2025.
• AI Mode monthly active users by May 2026: a billion+.
• AI Overviews monthly active users by Q2 2025: 2 billion.

Google Search Market Share Worldwide

The May 2026 reading from StatCounter Global Stats shows the rest of the market consolidating around a few alternatives.

• Google: 90.39% of worldwide all-device search in May 2026.
• Bing: 5.03%, the largest single competitor share.
• Yahoo! (which uses Bing’s index for organic results): 1.4%.
• Yandex: 0.99%, concentrated in Russia and CIS markets.
• DuckDuckGo: 0.71%, the largest privacy-first search engine globally.
• Baidu: 0.53%, primarily China-based.

By the numbers: Google’s lead over Bing in May 2026 sits at 85.36 percentage points (90.39 minus 5.03), roughly the same gap recorded a year earlier despite the AI search shake-up.

The competitive set behind Google has reshuffled rather than expanded. Bing has used Copilot integration to chip away at desktop share, while Yahoo! survives as a portal-driven query funnel rather than a standalone engine.

Mobile vs Desktop Search Engine Share

The desktop reading is the only device class where a single competitor is within striking distance of double digits, and it is the surface where Microsoft has invested most heavily in Copilot. The mobile gap, by contrast, traces directly to default search placement on Android handsets and Safari on iOS.

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Recent Developments

• May 19, 2026 (Google I/O 2026 keynote): Google announced AI Mode had crossed one billion monthly users in roughly one year, with queries more than doubling every quarter.
• May 19, 2026 (Google product blog post by Robby Stein): Google reported the average AI Mode query is triple the length of a traditional search query, and one in six U.S. searches now use voice or images.
• January 27, 2026 (Google AI announcement): Google made Gemini 3 the default model for both AI Overviews and AI Mode worldwide, calling it the largest single-quality jump shipped to AI answers in Search.
• October 2025 (Pew Research survey): A Pew survey found Americans split on AI summaries, with 20% rating them extremely or very useful, 52% somewhat useful, and 28% not useful.
• July 22, 2025 (Pew Research data study): Pew Research published an independent measurement of AI Overviews click-through impact, based on 68,879 searches by 900 U.S. adults in March 2025.
• February 2026 (Search Engine Land report): A Datos and Semrush clickstream panel reported searches per U.S. user on Google.com fell nearly 20% year over year between Q4 2024 and Q4 2025.

Google Search Revenue and Alphabet Financials

Key finding: Per Alphabet’s 10-K filing, Google Services revenues rose by $32.4 billion, or 12%, year over year, while Google Cloud added $10.1 billion, or 31%. Search alone contributed 56.6% of Alphabet’s consolidated revenue in 2024.

The revenue strength complicates the storyline that AI summaries are cannibalizing Search. Click-through rates may be dropping, but Google’s ad-load on AI-touched pages keeps monetisation curving upward, at least through the most recent reporting quarter.

AI Overviews Usage and Citation Impact

AI Overviews, the AI-generated paragraph that sits above traditional results, has scaled faster than any prior Google Search feature.

• Alphabet’s 10-K notes AI Overviews has been released in more than one hundred countries, reaching more than one billion users as of the fiscal-year close.
• By April 2025, Sundar Pichai disclosed AI Overviews reached more than 1.5 billion monthly users.
• Three months later, Alphabet’s Q2 2025 update raised the figure to 2 billion monthly users, available in over 200 countries and 40 languages.

Source: Alphabet Form 10-K and quarterly earnings releases, 2024-2025

The citation footprint inside AI Overviews follows a stable pattern. Pew’s analysis of 12,593 AI summaries found 88% cited three or more sources, while only 1% cited a single source. Wikipedia, YouTube, and Reddit together accounted for 15% of all AI-summary citations, while government sites appeared in 6% of summaries compared with 2% of standard search results.

Why it matters: Pages with an AI summary ended a browsing session 26% of the time, compared with 16% for pages without one, a 10-percentage-point swing that translates directly into shorter referral journeys for publishers downstream of Google.

AI Mode Adoption and Query Behavior

AI Mode is the conversational, multi-turn search experience Google launched in the U.S. in May 2025.

• AI Mode “has now surpassed a billion monthly active users globally”, according to Google VP of Product Search Robby Stein.
• AI Mode queries have more than doubled every quarter since launch.
• The average AI Mode search is triple the length of a traditional Google query.
• AI Mode reached 100 million monthly users in the U.S. and India combined within ten weeks of its U.S. launch.

Source: blog.google AI Mode US insights (May 19, 2026), Alphabet Q2 2025 earnings, blog.google AI updates (Jan 27, 2026)

The takeaway: Planning and brainstorming intents are growing faster than AI Mode queries overall, with planning-related queries growing 80% faster than overall AI Mode queries in the past six months and brainstorming queries growing 30% faster than queries overall since launch. The mix is shifting from quick fact lookups to compound, decision-style sessions.

Daily and Annual Google Search Volume

Google has been deliberately sparing with absolute volume disclosures.

• In a March 3, 2025 blog post, Google stated: “We already see more than 5 trillion searches on Google annually.”
• The 2016 baseline, the previous Google disclosure, was “more than 2 trillion” queries per year, a roughly 150% increase across nine years.
• At more than 5 trillion queries per year, the implied average is about 13.7 billion searches per day worldwide.

Source: Google company blog (March 3, 2025), Search Engine Land coverage

Worth noting: A Datos and Semrush clickstream panel reported searches per U.S. user on Google.com fell nearly 20% year over year between Q4 2024 and Q4 2025, even as the global query base kept climbing. The two trends can coexist because international growth and machine-generated queries (voice assistants, autocompletes, agentic calls) account for an increasing share of total volume.

The per-user decline matters more than the global rise for publishers and SEO teams: the same person now feeds fewer browser sessions into Google.com, even if Alphabet’s machinery handles more queries overall.

Voice and Visual Search Behavior

Google’s own disclosure puts a hard floor under the share of non-text search inside the U.S. surface.

• “More than one in six searches in the U.S. now use voice or images,” per Google’s May 2026 product post.
• U.S. image searches on Google are growing more than 40% month over month.

Source: blog.google, AI Mode US insights, May 19, 2026

By the numbers: Planning-related AI Mode queries grew 80% faster than overall AI Mode queries in the past six months, while brainstorming queries grew 30% faster than the AI Mode average since launch, according to Google’s product team.

The shift toward multimodal input feeds directly into the platform comparison many readers run between Google and ChatGPT, which lacks a comparable image-volume disclosure. Google’s voice and visual layer also overlaps with Gemini, the underlying model behind AI Overviews and AI Mode.

Year in Search 2025 Top Queries

Google’s Year in Search publication is the cleanest aggregate read on what the search base actually asked about over a full calendar year.

• Gemini was the top-searched global term of 2025, reflecting both consumer interest in AI assistants and Google’s own product rollout.
• DeepSeek also appeared in the global top 10, per Google’s Year in Search 2025.
• Cultural moments tracked in the Year in Search 2025 list include the death of Pope Francis, the nomination of Leo XIV, and the LA fires.

Source: Google “Year in Search 2025,” blog.google, December 4, 2025

Key finding: Searches starting with “Tell me about” rose 70% year over year in 2025, and queries starting with “How do I” reached an all-time high with a 25% annual increase.

Both phrasings imply users expect Google to handle longer, sentence-style inputs, which dovetails with the same dataset showing AI Mode queries running triple the length of legacy Google queries.

How AI Overviews Change Click-Through Rates

Pew Research’s July 2025 study tracked real browsing behavior, not survey self-reports.

• Pew Research’s dataset covers 68,879 Google searches by 900 U.S. adults across March 2025.
• Of those, 12,593 searches produced an AI summary, which is 18% of all searches in the study.
• 58% of respondents saw at least one AI summary during the month.
• Click-through to a traditional search result link was 8% on visits with an AI summary, versus 15% on visits without one.
• Clicks on links inside the AI summary itself were rare across the dataset.

The takeaway: Pew measured a 7-percentage-point drop in traditional-link click-through when an AI summary is present, paired with a 10-percentage-point rise in session-end rate. The combined effect is fewer downstream referrals to publishers regardless of which source the AI summary cites.

Antitrust Pressure on Google Search

A new variable layered onto the recent numbers: United States v. Google.

• On August 5, 2024, U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta ruled that Google “is a monopolist” in general search services and general text advertising.
• The opinion cited Google’s share at roughly 89.2% of general search queries on all platforms and 94.9% on mobile, drawn from the trial record.
• The remedy stopped short of a Chrome divestiture but imposed restrictions on exclusive distribution contracts and required Google to share certain data with qualified competitors.

Source: U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Memorandum Opinion, August 5, 2024; White and Case LLP analysis

Worth noting: The ruling does not unwind Google’s default-search contracts immediately. The court imposed restrictions on Google’s exclusive distribution agreements, paired with a data-sharing requirement intended to make rival engines more competitive without forcing structural separation.

Methodology

The figures draw on three primary-source classes: Alphabet financial filings, Google product disclosures, and independent measurement.

Alphabet financial filings cited here include the Form 10-K for fiscal year 2024 and earnings communications from Q1 and Q2 2025. Google product disclosures cited here include the March 3, 2025 blog post on annual query volume, the December 4, 2025 Year in Search 2025 post, the May 19, 2026 AI Mode US insights post, the May 19, 2026 I/O Search update, and the January 27, 2026 Gemini 3 announcement. Independent measurement comes from StatCounter for May 2026 search engine market share and from Pew Research Center, which published the July 2025 analysis of AI Overviews click-through rates.

StatCounter percentages can diverge from Google’s internal query share in markets where the tracker undersamples. Pew’s CTR figures are U.S.-only and limited to desktop and mobile-web sessions.

How Many Searches Does Google Process Per Day?

Google last confirmed its annual query volume on March 3, 2025, stating: “We already see more than 5 trillion searches on Google annually.” At that rate, daily volume averages around 13.7 billion queries. The company has not published a real-time daily figure, and the most rigorous external estimates from clickstream panels suggest an 8.5 to 16 billion daily range depending on whether voice, image, and assistant-driven queries are included.

Is Google Still the Most Used Search Engine?

Yes. StatCounter’s May 2026 reading shows Google at 90.39% of all-device worldwide search market share, with Bing second at 5.03%. Google’s lead widens on mobile and narrows on desktop, where Bing’s Copilot integration has gained the most ground.

What Percent of Google Searches Now Show an AI Summary?

Pew Research’s March 2025 study found that 18% of Google searches in their U.S. adult panel produced an AI Overview, and 58% of users saw at least one AI summary across the month. AI Overviews coverage has expanded since then as Google moved Gemini 3 in as the default model in January 2026, but no independent post-2025 measurement has updated the share figure.

Conclusion

The headline numbers all point in the same direction: 90.39% worldwide market share, $198.08 billion in annual Search revenue, more than 5 trillion queries a year, and over one billion AI Mode users. Pew-measured click-through to publishers is compressing while query length and modality keep expanding.