Over the past week, many have been windblown by Statcounter reporting that Google lost significant market share in the US and worldwide from March to April 2024. It turns out it was some sort of reporting bug, and Statcounter updated the data over the weekend.
Folks like Glenn Gabe and Danny Goodwin immediately called out that the data seems to be wrong and they were right. Goodwin posted a story on Sunday about this as well.
Originally and mistakenly, Statcounter showed Google’s U.S. search market share in the U.S. fell to 77.52% in April, down from 86.94% in March and down from 88.8% in April 2023. Now it is back up to 86.58% (March was 86.94%) – here is the revised chart:
Statcounter showed incorrectly that Microsoft Bing grew to 13.05% in April, up from 8.04% in March. Now it shows Bing at 8.24%. And Statcounter showed incorrectly that Yahoo grew to 7.3%, up from 2.48% in March. Now it shows Yahoo at 2.59%.
Global share reports. were not as drastic but those were also updated.
Old:
Updated:
I should note that Similarweb also noted the data seemed wrong and their data shows Google is still incredibly dominate:
From our data (Search Engine website category, US, March 2024) it doesn’t look like we’re there yet: pic.twitter.com/RBUJp4ZLeb
— Similarweb (@Similarweb) May 1, 2024
To think Google would lose that much market share in just a month seemed a bit too much for many of us. I know many of you were hopeful that these numbers were right, but they were not. I did wait to report on this until Statcounter responded to these concerns…
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