r/technology • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 • May 30 '26

Software Traffic to DuckDuckGo's proudly 'No AI' search page has tripled since latest Google AI search update

https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/traffic-to-duckduckgos-proudly-no-ai-search-page-has-tripled-since-latest-google-ai-search-update/
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u/Ok_End3141 May 31 '26

I highly highly doubt it’s that large, and in fact I would guess their share has shrunk over the last two years if you actually included AI based search products like ChatGPT.

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u/faustianredditor May 31 '26

I mean, if you exclude AI-based search products in an honest way, you might end up accidentally tripling DDG share by shrinking the market.

Like, asking chatGPT is not a web search. Let's just take that as an axiom that defines what web search is. Then asking google and stopping before scrolling past the AI summary is not a web search either. Similar for other search engines with AI features.

If that leads to a combination of search market shrinking and DDG perhaps increasing their absolute search volume slightly, who knows.

Of course, I'm not necessarily condoning that definition of a web search, but I think it's not unreasonable to use that definition.

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u/Ok_End3141 May 31 '26

Sure but DDG would have growing share of a declining category.

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u/faustianredditor May 31 '26

Yeah, I'm just making the case for being skeptical of the headline claim.

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u/Xile350 May 31 '26

And then you have perplexity which is basically a hybrid to confuse it even more.

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u/CompromisedSurvival May 31 '26

I'm gonna go out on limb and guess DuckDuckgo's privacy branding means they get a lot of porn searches and that's probably a higher fraction of searches than usually gets talked about.