ChatGPT fails to gain market share for Microsoft’s Bing

A month before Microsoft infused the search engine with generative AI, people were spending 33% less time using it than they had 12 months earlier, according to SensorTower.

Microsoft’s search engine ended 2023 with just 3.4%, up less than 1 percentage point, of the global search market, according to data analytics firm StatCounter, since it announced it was baking ChatGPT into Bing last February.

Bing has long struggled for relevance and attracted more mockery than recognition over the years as a serious alternative to Google. Multiple rebrandings and redesigns since its 2009 debut did little to boost Bing’s popularity. A month before Microsoft infused the search engine with generative AI, people were spending 33% less time using it than they had 12 months earlier, according to SensorTower.

The ChatGPT reboot at least helped reverse those declines. In the second quarter of 2023, US monthly active users more than doubled year over year to 3.1 million, according to a Bloomberg Intelligence analysis of SensorTower mobile app data.

Overall, users were spending 84% more time on the search engine, the data show. By year-end, Bing’s monthly active users had increased steadily to 4.4 million, according to SensorTower.

To build on the momentum, Microsoft has been adding more AI tools to Bing. In October, the company integrated the latest version of OpenAI’s image-generating model, DALL-E 3. Visitors can use it to create realistic-looking images with simple text prompts.

Bloomberg