An alternative search engine is any search engine other than Google. The definition is obvious; the problem it hides is less so: most of the names that appear in these lists don't own an index of the web. They show Bing or Google results inside a different interface, with a different data policy.
In the UK, search traffic that doesn't go through Google amounts to 8.25%. Of that slice, more than 90% still comes from a single index, Microsoft's. Changing search engine and changing results are two different things, and this article is about working out which engines actually do the second.
How much alternative search engines weigh in the UK
The UK data is less favourable to the alternatives than most "ditch Google" articles suggest. Bing, the largest of them, stops at 5.67%.
| Search engine | UK share (August 2026) | Where the results come from |
|---|---|---|
| 91.75% | Own index | |
| Bing | 5.67% | Own index |
| Yahoo | 1.25% | Bing |
| DuckDuckGo | 0.71% | Bing, plus its own crawler for some verticals |
| Ecosia | 0.30% | Google and Bing (European index only in France and Germany) |
| Yandex | 0.28% | Own index |
The figure that stands out is Yahoo at 1.25%, still ahead of DuckDuckGo despite all the attention the latter gets. It is not a comeback: Yahoo has shown Bing results since 2010. Added to Bing and DuckDuckGo, Microsoft's index serves 7.63% of UK searches. All the others put together don't reach 1%.
Who has their own index and who resells someone else's
Building and maintaining an index of the web is expensive: servers, crawlers, bandwidth, constant updating. That is why over the last twenty years the number of companies that manage it has fallen rather than risen. This table is the quickest way to understand what you are really using when you switch search engine.
| Search engine | Own index | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Yes | The largest in the world | |
| Bing | Yes | Also powers Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, AOL, Copilot |
| Brave Search | Yes | 100% since 27 April 2023, last call to Bing removed |
| Mojeek | Yes | 9 billion pages, own crawler since 2011 |
| Yandex | Yes | Independent Russian index |
| Baidu | Yes | Chinese index |
| Naver | Yes | Korean index |
| Seznam | Yes | Czech index |
| Kagi | Partial | Own Teclis and TinyGem indexes plus third-party APIs |
| Ecosia | Partial | EUSP European index in France and Germany, Google and Bing elsewhere |
| Qwant | Partial | Same EUSP infrastructure, co-built with Ecosia |
| DuckDuckGo | No | Links and images from Bing, own crawler for Instant Answers |
| Startpage | No | Buys results from Google and strips out tracking |
| Yahoo | No | Bing |
| Swisscows | No | Bing |
| SearXNG | No | Metasearch engine: queries other engines and aggregates |
Four names out of sixteen have their own index and operate in the West: Google, Bing, Brave and Mojeek. If you want results that differ from what you see on Google, those are the places to look. If you want less tracking, the list gets much longer, because DuckDuckGo and Startpage solve a privacy problem, not a problem of result diversity.
Search engines with an independent index
Brave Search
Brave took the opposite path to everyone else. At launch, in June 2021, 13% of queries needed help from an external provider. Less than a year later independence was at 93%, and on 27 April 2023 Brave announced it had removed the last call to the Bing APIs. Today every web result comes from its own crawler.
Coverage is still thinner than Google's, especially on local queries and small sites. It is worth trying on informational and technical searches, where the difference is less noticeable.
Mojeek
A British company, with its own crawler since 2011 and 9 billion pages indexed in 2025, up from the first billion reached in 2015. It is the most radically independent search engine around and also the most spartan: no personalisation, no AI rewriting of queries, results ranked by its own criteria. People who use it for editorial work do so for exactly that reason, because it returns pages Google has stopped showing.
Yandex, Baidu, Naver, Seznam
Four genuinely independent indexes, each dominant in its own market: Russia, China, South Korea, the Czech Republic. For a UK user they matter little. For a business that exports they matter a great deal, and they are the first place to look when setting up an international SEO strategy, because the ranking rules don't match Google's.
The European index that doesn't cover the UK yet
In November 2024 Ecosia and Qwant announced European Search Perspective, a 50/50 joint company to build a European web index. Ecosia said it plainly: until then it relied on a mix of Google and Bing.
EUSP results reached French users in 2025 and German users on 30 July 2026. In France most of Ecosia's traffic now goes through the European index. The UK is not on the list, and no date has been announced.
The practical consequence: a UK user on Ecosia or Qwant today sees Google or Bing results. The choice affects the data they leave behind and the trees Ecosia plants, not what they find.
The event that changed the market in 2025
On 11 August 2025 Microsoft retired the Bing Search APIs, shutting down all existing instances and closing new sign-ups. The suggested replacement is Grounding with Bing Search inside Azure AI Agents, a product designed for AI assistants, not for anyone reselling search results.
It is the single event that best explains why the list of alternative search engines has shrunk over the last two years. Dozens of small "independent" engines were wrappers around that API. Those with their own index, such as Brave and Mojeek, didn't notice. The others closed or changed provider.
AI engines are not alternative search engines in the same sense
ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot appear in almost every list under the same heading as the others. It is a misleading simplification, because they don't have an index: they query someone else's and rewrite the answer. Copilot uses Bing; Perplexity and ChatGPT combine third-party indexes with their own crawlers.
That makes them a different problem to solve. On a traditional search engine the goal is to appear in a list of ten links; on an answer engine the goal is to be the source cited inside a generated text. They are two separate jobs, and we have split them into two guides: how to rank on answer engines and what generative engine optimisation is. For the two most widely used systems there are dedicated guides on ChatGPT and Perplexity.
The reverse is also true: Google has brought generation into its own SERP with AI Overviews, so the line between traditional search engine and answer engine has thinned exactly where the traffic is concentrated.
Vertical search engines worth more than general-purpose alternatives
For many businesses, the traffic that can be won outside Google isn't on Brave or Mojeek. It is inside platforms that work as search engines without being called that.
- Amazon if you sell products. Amazon's internal search captures queries with purchase intent that would be expensive on Google through Google Ads.
- YouTube for searches that start with "how to". In manufacturing and software it is often the first point of contact.
- Openverse for public domain and Creative Commons images.
- PubMed and Semantic Scholar for scientific literature, where Google Scholar isn't enough.
- WolframAlpha for calculations and structured data; it is a computational engine rather than a search engine.
- Wayback Machine for recovering removed pages, useful in any analysis of a domain with a long history.
Thinking in channels rather than search engines is the approach behind omnichannel SEO: the question is not which search engine to rank on, but where the people who need to buy are searching.
Changing your default search engine, and why it is easier in Europe than before
Since 2024 the Digital Markets Act has required designated browsers to show a choice screen to users in the European Union (the UK is outside its scope). The measured effect exists and is stronger on browsers than on search engines: the NBER study Active Choice Interventions at Scale (Akesson, Amlani, Cepeda Suarez, Chissell, Hunt, Luca and Petrie, 2026) estimates Firefox usage in the EU at 91% higher on iOS and 13% higher on Android than in the scenario without the obligation. In search, Google's share in Europe stays around 90%, and in the UK it is 91.75%.
Changing it by hand is still the most reliable route. In Chrome it is under Settings, Search engine; in Safari on iPhone under Settings, Safari, Search Engine; in Firefox under Settings, Search. On iOS and Android the option sits in the browser settings, not the system settings.
One piece of advice almost nobody gives: before changing your default, keep the new search engine as a second engine for two weeks and count how many times you go back to Google. It is the only test that really tells you whether its coverage is enough for the searches you do.
What a business website should do
The good news is that there is little work, because there are few search engines to cover. Four steps, in order of return.
1. Set up Bing Webmaster Tools
In one go it covers 7.63% of UK searches: Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, AOL and Copilot read the same index. Verifying the domain takes ten minutes, and you can import the property directly from Google Search Console. The queries report shows a different vocabulary from Google's, with more desktop searches and an older average user.
2. Turn on IndexNow
It is an open protocol that notifies search engines of new or changed pages without waiting for the crawler. It is supported by Bing, Yandex, Naver, Seznam, Amazon and Yep: six search engines through a single endpoint. Google doesn't take part. On WordPress all you need is a plugin and a key of 8 to 128 characters uploaded to the domain root.
3. Look after your structured data
Search engines with fewer computing resources than Google rely more on what the page declares about itself, and answer systems read structured data to understand what a document is about. If you have already worked on schema markup for Google, that work already counts for the others too: it is the only one of the four steps that needs nothing new.
4. Measure separately
This is the step almost nobody takes, and it is why the question "how much traffic do alternative search engines bring?" goes unanswered in most businesses. Search Console only shows Google. In GA4 the smaller engines often end up in Organic Search together with Google, or in Referral when the source isn't recognised. You need a free-form exploration with Session source as the dimension and Sessions as the metric, filtered on the engine names; otherwise the figure doesn't exist.
How much traffic to really expect
An order of magnitude is more useful than any list. Take a real case we manage: an Italian outdoor equipment e-commerce business which, in July 2026, collected 1,353 organic clicks from Italy on 51,016 impressions, average position 6.17 and a CTR of 2.65%.
Those figures are Google only, because Search Console sees nothing else. Applying the StatCounter shares for Italy (Google 88.8%, Bing and Yahoo together 9.34% in July 2026) as a rough proportion, Microsoft's index across its shopfronts would be worth around 140 extra clicks a month, and all the other engines together fewer than 30. With the UK shares the same 1,353 Google clicks would imply about 110 from Microsoft's index and fewer than 10 from everyone else. It is not a measurement, it is an estimate with a wide margin: the mix of queries by sector changes the result a lot, and in technical B2B the Bing share tends to be above average because the traffic is desktop and comes from company networks.
The point is the proportion. On a site with a thousand monthly clicks from Google, at UK shares we are talking about roughly eighty extra clicks a month, which doesn't justify a separate strategy but does justify ten minutes of setup. On a site with a hundred thousand clicks the same proportion is worth around eight thousand visits a month, and the calculation changes. In the Macropix manufacturing project the main keyword, ledwall, has 4,400 monthly searches on Google in Italy: the same query on Bing moves volumes an order of magnitude lower, but with almost no competition on the first page.
The rule I use: below 5,000 organic clicks a month, set up Bing Webmaster Tools and stop there. Above that, it is worth looking at Bing queries the way you look at Google's, because in there are terms where you already rank second without knowing it. It is the same method as keyword research done on the data you already have.
Frequently asked questions
Something the industry rarely says
The concentration of indexes is a risk for anyone who produces content, and nobody talks about it because at the moment it costs nothing. If Bing changes its criteria tomorrow the way it changed its APIs in August 2025, four search engines go dark at the same moment. This isn't theory: it has already happened to the wrappers that lived on that API.
The way to stay out of it is not to spread your effort across ten search engines with fractional shares. It is to own a channel no index sits between: a newsletter, a customer list, a community. SEO brings people the first time, and that is what we work on every day in the SEO projects we run. What decides whether they come back is what you have built outside search engines.
