Global Search Engine Market Share for 2018 in the Top 15 GDP Nations

This post originally appeared on the Alphametic Blog.

Evaluating your International SEO efforts sometimes involves stepping out of the Google bubble. In this post, we’ll share the percentage of market penetration of individual search engines across the top 15 GDP countries.

OUR METHODOLOGY:

A list of the 15 nations with the largest nominal GDPs in the world (as of 2018) was compiled. StatCounter was then utilized to calculate the percentage of search engine market penetration within those nations. The resulting percentages were rounded to the nearest tenth and the top 5–6 search engines were reported.

According to the web analytics service, StatCounter, its tracking code is installed on more than 2 million sites globally. “These sites cover various activities and geographic locations. Every month, we record billions of page views to these sites. For each page view, we analyze the browser/operating system/screen resolution used and we establish if the page view is from a mobile device. For our search engine stats, we analyze every page view referred by a search engine…No artificial weightings are used. We remove bot activity and make a small adjustment to our browser stats for prerendering in Google Chrome. Aside from those adjustments, we publish the data as we record it.” — StatCounter FAQ

We chose not to utilize ComScore for this exercise, which uses a different tracking methodology, relying more on user panels. ComScore data shows higher market shares for Bing/Yahoo! in the US.

SUMMARY:

Within the United States Google continues to lead the pack, with a 16% increase since 2010. Bing and Yahoo make up the majority of the resulting percentages with a combined approximate 12% of market share. Although, compared to the other nations on this list, Google has a higher penetration in 9 other countries. In China, Google makes up a measly 1.5% of market share with search engine Baidu taking the lion’s share at 70%. In fact, Google places 4th after Shenma, Haosou and Sogou. Yahoo! continues to demonstrate a strong presence in Japan.

If Eastern Europe is a strong market for your brand, make sure to pay attention to Yandex, which is the search engine market leader in Russia, although Google has a 45% search market share as the 2nd highest. Nonetheless, with over 90% market share, Google dominates the search engine landscape in most of the top GDP nations in the world, including India, Germany, Mexico, Spain, Brazil, Italy and Australia.

When you’re thinking globally, Google is a great start. But, depending on your market, you might find that you need to pivot your SEO efforts into a different search engine altogether, such as Bing, Baidu, or Yandex, to capture the largest amount of traffic. Use the data below as a reference when determining your next global SEO strategy.

1. United States

Google: 87.28%

Bing: 6.91%

Yahoo!: 4.65%

DuckDuckGo: 0.59%

MSN: 0.21%

Other: 0.36%

2. China

Baidu: 70.26%%

Shenma: 19%

Haosou: 4.26%

Sogou: 3.71%

Google: 1.47%

Other: 0.98%

3. Japan

Google: 70.31%

Yahoo!: 24.03%

Bing: 4.78%

Baidu: 0.58%

DuckDuckGo: 0.1%

Naver: 0.06%

4. Germany

Google: 93.31%

Bing: 4.49%

Yahoo!: 1.03%

DuckDuckGo: 0.51%

t-Online: 0.24%

Yandex: 0.14%

5. United Kingdom

Google: 89.67%

Bing: 7.24%

Yahoo!: 2.27%

DuckDuckGo: 0.49%

Yandex: 0.09%

MSN: 0.06%

6. India

Google: 97.35%

Bing: 1.68%

Yahoo!: 0.91%

DuckDuckGo: 0.04%

Baidu: 0.01%

7. France

Google: 91.15%

Bing: 5.07%

Yahoo!: 1.92%

DuckDuckGo: 0.83%

Qwant: 0.56%

Yandex: 0.35%

8. Brazil

Google: 96.37%

Bing: 2.02%

Yahoo!: 1.51%

DuckDuckGo: 0.06%

Baidu: 0.02%

Yandex: 0.01%

9. Italy

Google: 94.81%

Bing: 3.52%

Yahoo!: 1.17%

DuckDuckGo: 0.15%

Arianna: 0.14%

Yandex: 0.12%

10. Canada

Google: 90.85%

Bing: 5.64%

Yahoo!: 2.49%

DuckDuckGo: 0.54%

Yandex: 0.22%

Baidu: 0.13%

11. South Korea

Google: 84.41%

Bing: 4.84%

Baidu: 4.84%

Shenma: 2.42%

Yandex: 1.88%

Yahoo!: 0.81%

12. Russia

Yandex: 51.08%

Google: 45.27%

Mail.ru: 2.12%

Bing: 0.57%

Yahoo!: 0.48%

Baidu: 0.25%

13. Australia

Google: 93.16%

Bing: 5.12%

Yahoo!: 0.6%

Baidu: 0.48%

DuckDuckGo: 0.35%

MSN: 0.11%

14. Spain

Google: 95.11%

Bing: 3.4%

Yahoo!: 1.26%

DuckDuckGo: 0.15%

Yandex: 0.02%

Baidu: 0.02%

15. Mexico

Google: 95.27%

Bing: 3.23%

Yahoo!: 1.39%

DuckDuckGo: 0.05%

MSN: 0.02%

Ask Jeeves: 0.01%

Want more statistics? Check out 18 Eye-Opening SEO Statistics to Prove the Value of Organic Search.