The most popular search engines in the UK are Google, with 91.39% of searches, Bing with 6.08% and Yahoo! with 1.32%, according to StatCounter for September 2026. DuckDuckGo, Ecosia and Yandex are all below 1%, and worldwide the order of the top two doesn't change: Google at 89.94%, Bing at 5.29%.
So far, the picture you'll find everywhere.
The trouble is that the headline figure hides where the other searches go. On Google UK's first page for "most popular search engines" today, the snippets quote worldwide figures: Search Engine Journal gives Google 90.01%, HubSpot "more than 89%". Accurate for the world, but in the UK Google's share on computers in September was 75.99%.
Fifteen points between those two numbers aren't a rounding error.
They mean that almost one in four searches made on a computer in the UK goes somewhere other than Google, while on phones it's fewer than two in a hundred.
We look at this for a practical reason. Macropix, an LED screen manufacturer based in Milan, held 25.55% share of voice on the ledwall cluster in July 2026, ahead of amazon.it at 18.08% (Semrush data, described in our guide to SEO for manufacturing). For buyers, Amazon is a search engine in every sense, and no market share table counts it.
Sunscape, which develops solar farms in Italy, went from 329 to 5,809 organic impressions a month in six months. We measure them in Search Console, which means on Google only.
And the rest of the searches, who sees those?
That's the question this page starts from. Here you'll find:
- UK and worldwide shares for September 2026, compared with August;
- the split between desktop and mobile, where the numbers move by twenty points;
- the countries where Google isn't in charge, useful if you export;
- a test of our own: how many times a month people in the UK type the name of another search engine or AI assistant into Google;
- the UK figure for searches without a click, published in June 2026.
Let's start.
The most popular search engines in the UK (and how little Google moved in a month)
In the UK six search engines get measurable use, and the first three make up 98.79% of the total. StatCounter measures the page views each engine sends to a sample of sites that use its code, not individual searches: it's the most up-to-date public source and the only one published monthly by country.
| Search engine | UK, August 2026 | UK, September 2026 | Change | World, September 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 91.75% | 91.39% | -0.36 points | 89.94% | |
| Bing | 5.66% | 6.08% | +0.42 points | 5.29% |
| Yahoo! | 1.25% | 1.32% | +0.07 points | 1.36% |
| DuckDuckGo | n/a | 0.65% | n/a | 0.74% |
| Ecosia | n/a | 0.30% | n/a | n/a |
| Yandex | n/a | 0.22% | n/a | 1.30% |
Two things stand out.
The first: Bing in the UK is above its world average (6.08% against 5.29%), while Yahoo! is in line with it. Yahoo! has shown Bing's results since 2010, so added together the two mean that 7.40% of UK searches are served by Microsoft's index.
The second: in a month Google lost only 0.36 points overall, while Bing and Yahoo! gained 0.49 between them. On computers, as the next section shows, the move was close to ten points.
So is Google collapsing?
No. One month doesn't make a trend, and as you'll see in the next section, the movement is all on computers. But it's the number to watch in October, and hardly anyone is looking at it. If you're interested in a direct comparison of the two indexes, we've done it in Google vs Bing: the differences that matter for your website.
Desktop and mobile are two different markets (on computers Google is at 75.99%)
On smartphones Google has 98.03% of UK searches, on computers 75.99%. The national share is the average of two markets that look nothing alike.
| Search engine | Desktop, August 2026 | Desktop, September 2026 | Mobile, September 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 85.89% | 75.99% | 98.03% | |
| Bing | 10.37% | 18.33% | 0.43% |
| Yahoo! | 2.21% | 3.87% | 0.53% |
| DuckDuckGo | n/a | 1.08% | 0.50% |
| Ecosia | n/a | 0.45% | 0.27% |
Read it like this: in September more than one computer search in five in the UK went through Bing or Yahoo! (22.20% combined). On phones, fewer than one in a hundred.
The jump from August to September, about ten points on desktop in thirty days, is too big to be just a change in habits. The plausible explanations are technical (Edge's default search engine on newly updated work computers, offices coming back from the summer holidays, a change in the sample), and StatCounter doesn't publish the detail. Treat the figure as a signal, not a trend, until October confirms it.
Keep the traffic split in mind too: in September 53.56% of page views in the UK came from mobile, 41.78% from desktop and 4.66% from tablets. Four page views in ten still come from a computer.
One clue that Bing's share isn't purely an artefact: in our volume test (further down) "bing" is searched on Google 823,000 times a month in the UK, more than "perplexity" and "deepseek". These are people reaching Bing by way of Google, probably from a PC where Bing is already the home page.
What to do about it in practice is in our guide to mobile SEO and, for Bing, at the end of this page.
Worldwide Google has 89.94% (but in four countries the race is open)
Worldwide the most used search engine is Google, with 89.94% in September 2026, followed by Bing (5.29%), Yahoo! (1.36%), Yandex (1.30%), DuckDuckGo (0.74%) and Baidu (0.44%). The average, though, hides the markets where a local competitor holds its own.
| Country | First search engine | Second search engine | What it means if you export |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States | Google 85.19% | Bing 9.89% | Bing is worth about 1.6 times its UK share |
| Russia | Yandex 70.33% | Google 28.12% | Without Yandex you see less than a third of the market |
| South Korea | Google 47.97% | Naver 43.06% | Two search engines almost level |
| Czech Republic | Google 78.71% | Seznam 15.05% | A national search engine with one search in seven |
| United Kingdom | Google 91.39% | Bing 6.08% | Microsoft at 7.4% adding Yahoo! |
China and Japan are missing, and not by oversight. For September 2026 StatCounter puts Yandex at 14.98% in China and Bing at 31.41% in Japan, figures that don't match any other source on those two markets. We'd rather leave them out than copy them.
For a business selling into Russia, Korea or the Czech Republic, the SEO plan has to be built on two search engines with different rules. Which ones have their own index and which resell other engines' results is on our page about alternative search engines.
And in the UK? Our test adds a detail here too: "yandex" is searched on Google 823,000 times a month, as often as "bing". The Russian search engine accounts for 0.22% of UK searches, but its name doesn't.
How many searches happen every day (5 trillion a year on Google alone)
Google gets more than 5 trillion searches a year: the company said so itself on its official blog on 3 March 2025. That's about 13.7 billion a day, or more than 158,000 searches a second.
Alongside Google there are AI assistants, which count users rather than searches. The latest official figures:
- Google's AI Mode has passed 1 billion monthly users, and the Gemini app is at 950 million: Sundar Pichai said so in his remarks on the second-quarter results, on 22 July 2026;
- OpenAI talks about 1.2 billion weekly users in total in its DevDay recap of 29 September 2026.
So is ChatGPT now a search engine as big as Google?
No, and there's a study that measures actions rather than users. Rand Fishkin of SparkToro, using Datos's desktop panel, counted the searches made in 2025 on 41 sites where people look for things: search engines, online shops, social networks, AI assistants. In the research published on 2 March 2026, on the US sample for the fourth quarter of 2025:
- Google accounts for 73.7% of searches, not 90%, because Amazon, YouTube, Booking and the others are counted too;
- online shops together account for about 10%, social networks 5.5%;
- all AI tools together account for 3.2%, and Amazon, Bing and YouTube each beat ChatGPT on their own.
In the EU and UK sample Google rises to around 80%. And a second figure from the same project explains the gap between users and searches: 97% of people who visit Google search, against 56% of people who open ChatGPT. The other 44% are there to write, translate, summarise.
It's the same thing we see with Macropix: the competitor that counts in the ledwall niche is amazon.it, not an AI assistant. The "alternative" search engine that matters to a manufacturer often has a shopping basket.
What people in the UK type into Google to go elsewhere (our test on 19 names)
Every month people in the UK type "chatgpt" into Google 24.9 million times, one and a half times as often as "google" (16.6 million). That's the result of a test we ran on 10 October 2026 on the search volumes of 19 names of search engines and AI assistants.
Method: Google Ads volumes for the United Kingdom in English, read through DataForSEO; monthly average from September 2025 to August 2026. These are navigational searches, people using Google to reach another service. They measure how much a name is searched for, not how much the service is used. We had run the same test for Italy three days earlier.
| Search on Google | Searches a month in the UK (12-month average) | September 2025 | August 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| youtube | 45,500,000 | 45,500,000 | 37,200,000 |
| amazon | 24,900,000 | 24,900,000 | 24,900,000 |
| chatgpt | 24,900,000 | 24,900,000 | 24,900,000 |
| 16,600,000 | 20,400,000 | 16,600,000 | |
| chat gpt | 11,100,000 | 11,100,000 | 11,100,000 |
| google maps | 9,140,000 | 9,140,000 | 9,140,000 |
| gemini | 3,350,000 | 2,240,000 | 4,090,000 |
| yahoo | 3,350,000 | 3,350,000 | 2,740,000 |
| copilot | 2,240,000 | 1,830,000 | 1,500,000 |
| claude | 1,000,000 | 201,000 | 1,220,000 |
| duckduckgo | 1,000,000 | 1,000,000 | 1,220,000 |
| bing | 823,000 | 823,000 | 823,000 |
| yandex | 823,000 | 823,000 | 1,000,000 |
| perplexity | 301,000 | 301,000 | 165,000 |
| deepseek | 246,000 | 301,000 | 201,000 |
| startpage | 90,500 | 60,500 | 110,000 |
| ecosia | 40,500 | 40,500 | 33,100 |
| brave search | 22,200 | 12,100 | 33,100 |
| qwant | 12,100 | 9,900 | 12,100 |
Three readings, in order of importance.
Google is the front door to its competitors too. Adding "chatgpt" and "chat gpt" gives 36 million searches a month: a huge share of the people in the UK who use ChatGPT get there by typing it into Google.
Claude and Gemini are the assistants growing fastest in a year: "claude" goes from 201,000 to 1.22 million monthly searches, six times as many, and "gemini" from 2.24 to 4.09 million, almost double. "perplexity" goes the other way, dropping from 301,000 to 165,000.
The "privacy" search engines remain a niche even as a curiosity: Ecosia, Startpage and Brave Search together come to about 153,000 searches a month, less than 1% of the searches for "google". DuckDuckGo is the exception, with a million.
If you want to know how AI search engines choose which sources to cite, we cover it in our guide to AI search engines.
Zero-click searches in the UK: 69.5% (the highest of six countries)
In the UK 69.5% of Google searches end without a click, according to the SparkToro study published on 16 June 2026, based on Similarweb's desktop and mobile panel for January to April 2026. For every 1,000 UK searches, 232 clicks reach a site outside Google.
We already quote this figure on our SEO statistics page. What stands out is the ranking: the UK comes last of the six countries, behind the United States as well.
| Country | Searches without a click | Clicks to external sites per 1,000 searches | Clicks to Alphabet sites |
|---|---|---|---|
| Germany | 62.1% | 287 | 9.2% |
| Italy | 63.4% | 280 | 8.6% |
| Canada | 63.8% | 268 | 9.4% |
| France | 65.3% | 271 | 7.6% |
| United States | 68.0% | 231 | 8.4% |
| United Kingdom | 69.5% | 232 | 7.3% |
The most useful comparison is with Germany: for the same 1,000 searches, a German site has 287 clicks available against 232 for a UK site, 24% more. The UK and the US are almost level. Fishkin suggests the higher click rates in the EU may be linked to the EU's restrictions and penalties on Google for favouring its own services, and adds that culture, language or interface differences could also play a part.
The rest of the picture isn't reassuring. In the US, searches without a click went from 60.45% in 2024 to 68.01% in the first four months of 2026 (Fishkin notes the two years come from different panels). The UK is already above that level, and the clicks available shrink every quarter.
That's why at Sunscape we look at impressions first and clicks second: from 329 to 5,809 impressions in six months, against clicks that went from 46 to 195. Visibility grows faster than traffic, and if you only measure visits you see a third of the work. The mechanism is explained on our page about zero-click searches.
Seven searches in ten bring no click: what share of yours?
In the UK 69.5% of searches end inside Google. Let's look at your site's impressions, clicks and devices together to see how much visibility you're already getting and how much you're leaving to AI Overviews, Bing and marketplaces.
Book a strategy consultationWho searches with AI in the UK (more than half of adults)
54% of UK adults say they use AI tools such as ChatGPT, Copilot or Gemini, up from 31% a year earlier; among 16-24-year-olds it's 79%, among 25-34-year-olds 74%. These are the figures from Ofcom's Adults' Media Use and Attitudes report, published on 2 April 2026 (fieldwork from September to November 2025).
Search is still the bigger habit: according to Ofcom's Online Nation 2025, Google Search is used by 82% of adults. Almost everyone searches. Just over half also use an assistant.
And when they do, the traffic that reaches websites is still small. In SE Ranking's study of more than 13,700 sites (Google Analytics data, January to April 2025), AI search tools brought 0.12% of visits to UK sites, up from 0.01% in 2024.
So can you ignore AI?
No, because most AI search happens inside Google: AI Mode already has a billion users a month, and in the UK about 30% of searches now show an AI Overview, according to the same Ofcom Online Nation report. That's where a citation is worth having, and you measure it with tools other than Search Console: we've laid them out in our guide to AI visibility. The differences between the acronyms are in SEO, AEO and GEO.
What to do with these numbers (three checks of an hour each)
Search engine statistics are useful for one thing only: deciding where to spend the hours of work on your own site. Three checks are enough.
1. Look at the split by device before talking about Bing
Open your organic sessions for the last twelve months split by device. If desktop is above 50%, Bing and Yahoo! together can account for a fifth of your searches: register the site in Bing Webmaster Tools and check that the main pages are indexed. If mobile is above 70%, leave it.
2. Count the searches that happen outside search engines
If you sell products, Amazon is your second search engine: "amazon" alone is searched 24.9 million times a month in the UK. If you explain how to do things, it's YouTube. The rules are different, and you'll find them in our guides to Amazon SEO and YouTube SEO.
3. Measure impressions, not just clicks
With 69.5% of searches ending without a click, organic traffic tells less than a third of the story. Impressions in Search Console and your visibility on category keywords, your share of voice, tell you whether you're occupying the results page even when nobody clicks. That's how we measured Macropix's five years, described on our page about how long SEO takes.
Frequently asked questions about the most popular search engines
Yes. In September 2026 Google had 89.94% of searches worldwide and 91.39% in the UK, according to StatCounter. Worldwide it is followed by Bing at 5.29% and Yahoo! at 1.36%.
Yes. Bing had 6.08% of UK searches in September 2026, ahead of Yahoo! at 1.32%. Because Yahoo! shows Bing's results, Microsoft's index serves 7.40% of searches in the UK, and 22.20% on desktop.
No. In the SparkToro study with Datos data for the fourth quarter of 2025 (desktop, United States), Google accounts for 73.7% of searches across 41 sites, while all AI tools together account for 3.2%. Amazon, Bing and YouTube each beat ChatGPT on their own.
No. StatCounter counts the page views that each search engine sends to the sites in its sample. It measures traffic sent, not the number of searches made, which is why its figures change from one month to the next more than habits do.
No. In September 2026 DuckDuckGo had 0.65% of UK searches, Yahoo! 1.32%. On Google, "duckduckgo" is searched 1 million times a month in the UK, against 3.35 million for "yahoo".
It depends on the devices your audience uses. On mobile Bing has 0.43% of UK searches, on desktop 18.33%. If more than half of your organic sessions come from computers, registering the site in Bing Webmaster Tools and checking its indexing is worth the hour it takes.
In short
Google at 91.39% in the UK, but 75.99% on computers.
On computers more than one search in five goes through Bing or Yahoo!.
69.5% of UK searches end without a click.
AI assistants are growing, but in the United States they still weigh less than Amazon.
And one thing that never shows up in search engine rankings: "chatgpt" is searched on Google one and a half times as often as "google". The most used search engine in the UK is also the road most people take to reach its competitors. As long as that's the case, the useful question for a website isn't which search engine will win, but on which Google pages your name appears when someone is about to go elsewhere: comparison searches, reviews, alternatives. That's where it's decided whether the click, when there is one, comes to you.
If you'd like to work on it with real data from your site, see how we approach SEO and SEO for AI search engines, then get in touch.
Until next time!
