Microsoft’s strategic revamp of its Bing search engine appears to be paying off, with notable gains in search market share at the expense of Google. Two years after Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella declared his ambition to make Google “dance” by launching an AI-powered overhaul of Bing, recent data suggests the company is seeing measurable returns on that investment, particularly on desktop platforms.
Bing sees a rise in search volume and revenue
Microsoft reported this week that its search and news advertising revenue grew by US$1.6 billion, marking a 13% increase over the past fiscal year. When excluding traffic acquisition costs, revenue rose by 20%. The company attributed this growth to a consistent increase in search volume and higher revenue per search.
According to Jordi Ribas, Microsoft’s head of search, the increased search traffic has also translated into tangible market share gains. Posting on X (formerly Twitter), Ribas shared that data from Comscore shows that Bing now holds 29% of the US desktop search market. Google remains the leader at around 60%, but Bing’s share marks a 2.1 percentage point rise since the launch of Bing Chat in February 2023.
Microsoft reported this week that our search and news business excluding traffic acquisition costs grew 21% and 20% in constant currency driven by volume and rate growth across Bing and Edge. This is now the fourth consecutive year in which Bing and Edge took market share. Below… pic.twitter.com/QJadB9uZtI
— Jordi Ribas (@JordiRib1) July 31, 2025
StatCounter data echoes this upward trend, showing Bing’s global search share at 11.6%—a 3.4 percentage point increase compared to two years ago. During the same period, Google has lost 6.1 percentage points of worldwide market share and 1.2 percentage points in the US, according to both Comscore and StatCounter.
Billions at stake in the battle for search
While these gains might appear modest in percentage terms, they represent significant revenue potential for Microsoft. At the time of Bing Chat’s launch in 2023, Philippe Ockenden, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President of Finance, remarked: “For every 1 point of share gain in the search advertising market, it’s a US$2 billion revenue opportunity for our advertising business.”
Given that Bing has gained several percentage points since then, the financial implications are far from trivial, especially as Microsoft’s overall market capitalisation recently crossed US$4 trillion. The company’s growth in the search sector aligns with its broader push into artificial intelligence and increased integration of AI tools across its software and services.
Desktop dominance, mobile struggles
Despite Bing’s momentum on desktop, its performance across all devices, including mobile and tablets, still lags significantly behind Google. StatCounter reports that Bing holds just 4% of the global search market across all platforms. In contrast, Google commands nearly 90%.
This suggests that Microsoft’s efforts to boost Bing usage—such as setting Bing as the default search engine in the Edge browser on Windows devices—have had a more substantial impact on desktop users than on mobile. It also highlights the challenge Microsoft faces in converting gains in one area into broader success across the entire search landscape.
As mobile usage continues to dominate internet access globally, Microsoft will likely need to refine its mobile strategy if it hopes to narrow the gap with Google in a more meaningful way. Still, the current trends indicate that Bing is steadily chipping away at Google’s long-held dominance, one percentage point at a time.
