New statistics seem to show that Microsoft’s Bing AI isn’t helping drive traffic to its search site.
According to analytics company Statcounter, Bing.com has actually declined in terms of market share for global search engine traffic, so this isn’t even the case that the Bing chatbot is only making small profits – in fact, the search site has declined (as highlighted by ZDNet).
At least compared to January 2023, when Bing.com had a 3.03% share of the search market, and as of July this year that has dropped very slightly to 2.99%.
Frankly, that 2.99% figure represents a small gain from the 2.76% share Bing.com had in April.
ZDNet also points to another analytics company, Compareweb, which puts Bing.com’s search share at 3.23%, which is pretty much the same as at the start of 2023.
Another analytics outfit, YipitData, also has numbers that apparently show Bing traffic at 95.7 million in February, growing to 99.2 million in April – but then dropping to 97.7 million in June (this excludes China , mind you, and mobile devices too).
The overall picture this paints looks very much like Bing.com has remained pretty much flat in terms of how many users search the web using the site, and despite the launch of the Bing AI in February and its subsequent full rollout in May – and that was clearly not Microsoft’s plan.
Analysis: an uphill battle (and a half)
Microsoft is facing a very steep uphill battle in the search world, where Google has been dominant for so long at this point. So when the Bing chatbot arrived on the scene, Microsoft no doubt thought it could be the secret weapon it needs to really cut into Google’s big lead.
Even Google was concerned about what might happen – just think of the frenzied rush to launch its rival Bard AI, when Microsoft pushed Bing AI onto the scene (also rather early, before it was really ready).
As noted, these new stats look alarming in terms of the light they shed on the impact of Bing AI, but Microsoft isn’t buying it, claiming that the numbers here are skewed – and that they don’t account for surfers going directly to the Bing go chatbots page.
Microsoft told ZDNet, “Our usage signals have shown strong growth since February and thanks to new entry points like Bing Chat Enterprise, we’ve experienced one of our biggest months of growth ever since we launched our new Bing and Edge experience.”
For their part, the analytics companies told ZDNet that their numbers do account for direct traffic to Bing Chat.
David F. Carr, senior insight manager at Relatedweb, commented, “Microsoft says their internal numbers show greater growth than we think. It’s possible we’re missing some of the Bing Chat interactions that use an Edge sidebar or extension, but I don’t know how important that is in the grand scheme of things.”
While we can’t know the full story here, and we certainly wouldn’t say Microsoft doesn’t have a point, the fact that there are three separate sources of third-party data that match – roughly – every other is quite telling. And as Carr points out, any missing bits and pieces of data are likely to be of questionable significance.
That said, this is going to be a very long game for Microsoft, with the idea that Edge, Bing.com, and Bing AI will all reinforce each other and eventually build both browser share and search share, with Chrome competing for best web browser, as well as Google To search.
Microsoft is certainly building features into its chatbot at a breakneck pace, and over time Bing AI could help drive search (and browser) adoption, but at this admittedly relatively early stage there doesn’t seem to be much to happen.