Bing market share stagnant since its debut, new statistics show

Much to Microsoft's chagrin, the new Bing market share has remained stagnant since it was introduced. To those unaware, Microsoft made a multi-billion dollar investment earlier this year in a bid to extend its partnership with OpenAI, the company behind the ChatGPT AI chatbot.

Since then, the American tech giant has been sparing no effort to integrate generative AI across its products and services, including the new Bing. Aside from this, Microsoft is reportedly prepping to add a free GPT-4 toggle for Bing Chat AI on Android and iOS.

Following the arrival of Bing Chat, Bing garnered skyrocketing popularity, crossing 100 million daily active users for the first time ever. Despite Microsoft's investment in the technology, new stats suggest Bing's search market share is just mediocre.

According to the data shared by Statcounter, Bing's global search engine share was 2.99 per cent last month. In January, it was 3.03 per cent. So, it is safe to say that Bing's market share hasn't changed a lot this year, as pointed out by the folks at ZDNET.

This doesn't come as a surprise given that Microsoft's Bing Chat has been facing quality issues lately. Now, analytics firm YipitData has shared web traffic metrics, shedding some light on the number of Bing visitors this year.

Unsurprisingly, a considerable number of users developed an interest in the new technology, which led to increased usage of the tool. In February, Bing's usage was 95.7 million, but it skyrocketed to 101.7 million in March. Regrettably, the traffic was short-lived.

Eventually, the numbers dropped to 96.4 million in April. Usage increased again in May to 99.2 million. It is worth noting that YipitData's analytics do not consider mobile devices and China's usage. A myriad of factors caused the decline in usage of the tool.

Why is Bing still unpopular?

First, the tool was accused of giving inaccurate responses and being rude to users during its debut. As expected, this triggered an uproar among users across social media platforms, criticising Bing's efficiency and effectiveness.

On top of that, the tool could be accessed only on Microsoft's Chromium-based browser, Microsoft Edge. This did not sit well with some users who preferred using other browsers like Google Chrome. Since the tool was in preview, only a few select users could access it.

Later, the company decided to release the tool to open preview and even got rid of the Microsoft Account requirements. Microsoft, on the other hand, continues to consider the new Bing a great success, while refuting the aforesaid claims.

According to the technology giant, the figures revealed by the analytic firms do not directly represent the actual numbers since they do not include users who use the tool directly from Bing's Chat page. The senior insights manager for Similarweb, David F. Carr told ZDNet that "Microsoft says their internal numbers show greater growth than we're reflecting."

"It's possible that we're missing some of the Bing Chat interactions that use an Edge sidebar or extension, but I don't know how significant that is in the grand scheme of things," Carr added. "While we cannot comment on third-party data, we can share that Bing has grown to exceed 100 million daily active users," a Microsoft spokesman told ZDNet.

Microsoft Bing: What else to expect?

Microsoft recently celebrated six months since debuting Bing Chat. During the occasion, the company marked some of the tool's success including Bing Image Creator, third-party browser support, multimodal visual search in chat, and more.

The fact that Microsoft is gearing up to bring Bing AI to third-party browsers is a major sign that the company is prepping to enter a new market. Several users are likely to leverage the tool's capability since it is available across a slew of platforms, unlike before when it was exclusively available on Edge.

According to SimilarWeb, the number of people using ChatGPT has decreased by 12 per cent between June and July. To make things worse, the FTC has launched an investigation to find out whether OpenAI broke consumer protection laws while operating.

If the American AI company is found guilty, the repercussions are likely to spread beyond OpenAI and even affect Microsoft.