According to a recent note from Bank of America, Google's global search market share experienced a slight decline in July.
The investment bank said Statcounter data revealed that Google's share decreased by 4 basis points (bps) month-over-month (m/m) and 105 bps year-over-year (y/y), settling at 91.0%.
In contrast, they note that Bing's share increased by 16 bps m/m and 89 bps y/y, reaching 3.9%. Other search engines, including Yandex, Baidu, Naver, and DuckDuckGo, saw a decline of 10 bps m/m but an increase of 9 bps y/y, also holding a 3.9% share.
Furthermore, Bank of America says that on desktop, Google's share dropped by 8 bps m/m and 316 bps y/y to 80.3%. Bing's desktop share, on the other hand, saw a significant increase of 28 bps m/m and 264 bps y/y.
In the United States, the bank says that Google's overall share decreased by 5 bps m/m and 148 bps y/y, with its mobile share down by 5 bps m/m and 40 bps y/y, and its desktop share down by 26 bps m/m and 334 bps y/y. Bing's share in the U.S. grew by 9 bps m/m, with a slight decline in mobile but a substantial rise in desktop.
The Bank of America note also highlighted that traffic to Google's site declined by 1% m/m to 2.7 billion visits. In comparison, ChatGPT's traffic is said to have remained flat at 82 million, Bing's traffic increased by 6% to 55 million, and Gemini's traffic decreased by 14% to 8 million. Despite new AI-based search platforms gaining traction, their combined daily web traffic remains less than 0.2% of Google's.
Bank of America remains optimistic about the positive impact of AI monetization on search in 2024.
"We remain positive on the growing Gemini integration across the Google ecosystem," stated the analysts, predicting that broader AI rollout will drive higher usage and incremental ad spend on the platform.
However, they add that the potential impacts of the Department of Justice trial and the broader launch of OpenAI's SearchGPT remain overhangs on the stock. Nonetheless, Bank of America says that Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL)'s strong data, technology, distribution, and financial advantages are expected to mitigate new competitive threats.