Search engine referral report for 2025 Q2 | Hacker News Reader

Search engine referral report for 2025 Q2

radar.cloudflare.com

122 pointsvgeek55 comments

Considering the fact that very few people exit from AI searches into the web, rather than just ending the session (having received the answer they were looking for); it seems to me that this report would vastly overstate traditional search engine market share. Personally I’ve basically stopped using Google as my primary search. I usually start by searching in an LLM. Especially if the query is complex (e.g. give me a summary of USAs current lunar missions and progress towards a lunar base.) The only time I still go to google is for maps related searches. To find local businesses. But often in that case I will go directly to maps.google.com. I would like to see a real report on market share. I expect Google has lost a lot and hasn’t yet admitted it.

If you go Google something right now you’re not doing a web search like you were even a year ago - the first thing that comes up (and takes up most of the screen depending on your device) is a Gemini response to your query.

At the least it can be inferred that Google has fundamentally changed their main product to mimic a competitor, which is something you just don’t do if everything’s OK.

knowledge cards at the top of Google results have been around for at least 12 years, I'd interpret the LLM-based responses as an iteration of a feature that's been around for a while rather than mimicking a competitor.

> At the least it can be inferred that Google has fundamentally changed their main product to mimic a competitor, which is something you just don’t do if everything’s OK.

I mean, the big thing that has changed is that investors are all in on AI, and Google looked like they were behind in this area, so they put it front and center so that they can talk nonsense about it on investor calls.

> Especially if the query is complex (e.g. give me a summary of USAs current lunar missions and progress towards a lunar base.)

This terrifies me. The number of ostensibly smart, curious people who now fill their knowledge gaps with pseudorandom information from LLMs that's accurate just often enough to lower mental guards. I'm not an idiot; I know most people never did the whole "check and corroborate multiple sources" thing. What actually happened in the average case was that a person delegated trust to a few parties who, in their view, aligned with their perspective. Still, that sounds infinitely preferable to "whatever OpenAI/Google/whoever's computer says is probably right". When people steelman using LLMs for knowledge gathering, they like to position it as a first step to break in on a topic, learn what there is to learn, which can then be followed by more specific research that uses actual sources. I posit that the portion of AI users actually following up that way is vanishingly small, smaller even than the portion of people who read multiple news sources and research the credibility of the publications.

I value easy access to information very highly, but it seems like when people vote with their feet, eyes, and wallets that's not what you get. You get fast and easy, but totally unreliable information. The information landscape has never been great, but it seems to only get worse with each paradigm shift. I struggle to even imagine a hypothetical world where reliable information is easy to access. How do you scale that? How do you make it robust to attack or decay? Maybe the closest thing we have now is Wikipedia, is there something there that could be applied more broadly?

For a brief overview on a topic the accuracy is good enough. It might get some minor details wrong but they are generally superfluous to the topic, it typically breaks down when you are really getting into the weeds of a topic, or really niche subjects, at which point you have exceeded the utility of the LLMs. I have read many blog posts linked off 1st ranking position google queries in the past and found their answers to have inaccuracies as well, how is that better?

> I have read many blog posts linked off 1st ranking position google queries in the past and found their answers to have inaccuracies as well, how is that better?

It's roughly as bad, if you assume the same degree of trust in both scenarios. I don't make that assumption. I get the sense that people are more likely to trust the AI answer at the top of the search results page or handed back to them in a ChatGPT conversation than they are to totally buy a random blogger. If I'm wrong, then great.

It seems like the key metric missing from this report is volume of referrals, reported over time. Ideally, segmented to user-initiated web searches, to filter out things like searches generated via a Spotlight search in iOS.

I’d be very interested to see the trendline of user-initiated search over time.

Google on 88.9% of search results clicked and bing on 3.056% with everyone else even less. This is not a competitive market and it seems very stable over time.

What do you think most people use when they need a taxi now days? Humans believe the market is some kind of magical place where everyone gets a slice of the pie. This is not true, winners are a thing.

The taxi market is still pretty fragmented. Markets evolve in different ways depending on the nature of the goods and services being exchanged and the environment in which they operate.

Which is one reason why robust antitrust enforcement is necessary, yet most of the antitrust laws on the books have barely been enforced since the late 70s.

Over here, I'd say minicar or maxicar

It really shows you what a bubble HN is.

Every post about Google for years has been people saying it's terrible and dead.

Kagi gets talked about on here constantly, and it's not even on the list (though I suspect there's a reason?)

Even within Google, about a year ago, everyone was saying that Google was dead because of Perplexity, which is barely a blip.

It's kind of shocking to see DuckDuckGo is only about 1%, with everything you hear and how much you hear it within certain bubbles.

> Kagi gets talked about on here constantly, and it's not even on the list (though I suspect there's a reason?)

Not that I'd expect them high up on the list, but Kagi sends the following response header:

    Referrer-Policy: same-origin

As a result the browser won't send a Referer header with outgoing links, completely excluding them from this report.

Even if they could technically show up in the logs, we know that their MAUs are 5-6 orders of magnitude lower than Google's, from their own claims.

To be exact, we are about 8 seconds worth of Google daily queries :) [1]

Not much, but each one of those deliberate & paid.

[1] https://kagi.com/stats?stat=queries

If my math is right, that would put it between Lilo and Startpage in the rankings

I’d argue that HN sentiment is a leading indicator, not a claim of current reality.

Compared to a year ago, Google has declined from 89.487% to 88.915%. Just half a percent, but IMO it will accelerate.

Meanwhile OpenAI has gone from 0.194% to 0.226% in just three months (they weren’t on previous quarter’s reports).

Sure, it’ll be years before Google drops to 50%. But it will happen.

Google spends something around 30 billion dollars a year to be the default search engine across many platforms. You can spend the same amount and tomorrow your search engine will have 88.9% of searches.

It's not a charity, if people truly preferred Google results over defaults, Google wouldn't give out tens of billions of dollars to be the default.

> Google spends something around 30 billion dollars a year to be the default search engine across many platforms. You can spend the same amount and tomorrow your search engine will have 88.9% of searches.

It is a widely held belief that users don’t change the defaults, and I’m not asserting it’s wrong in general, but why doesn’t it apply to web browsers?

As an (unhappy) Windows user, I note that Microsoft pushes Edge aggressively, with each major Windows update “helpfully” offering to “optimize my computer” by making it the default browser again. However, Edge market share is only ~12% on desktop [0], despite the fact it is significantly more work to install Chrome than it is to change a mere default setting. Is that just because desktop users are more willing to jump through hoops?

[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...

Chrome didn't get its marketshare out of thin air either. It paid other software to be bundled just like malware apps, and automatically configured itself to be the default browser.

It also prominently advertised itself on the Google home page, which would probably cost many many billions of dollars if a non-Google browser wanted to do the same thing. On top of that, if you used another modern browser like Firefox, Google websites had popups that you should upgrade your outdated browser to Chrome.

Once Chrome on desktop was popular, then came the "oopses". [1] Accidentally breaking Google websites on non-Chrome browsers left and right.

After Android became popular, it's not hard to guess which browser they shipped by default on millions of devices. Device manufacturers weren't allowed to remove Chrome if they wanted to have working Google Play Services and access to the Google Play Store. I think recently in the EU manufacturers are allowed to remove Chrome and keep Play Services because Google got fined 4 billion euros.

[1]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...

> Kagi gets talked about on here constantly, and it's not even on the list (though I suspect there's a reason?)

Being at least 10€/month for the only "useful" tier is a powerful reason for that...

Maybe also Kagi being a metasearch engine reduces its visibility? Just speculating, I obviously don't know how it really works.

My Kagi account is $5 (USD)/ mo and it is VERY useful.

I meant that only starting from 10 $. You get unlimited searches. I'd burn these in a few days, as I rely heavily on my search engine.

Fortunately, I have been able to join a family on sharesub and get "unlimited" for basically half the price. Actually, it's a great search engines, with lots of goodies. I really hope it gets more adoption.

> Every post about Google for years has been people saying it's terrible and dead.

They are terrible, but that doesn't mean anybody else is good or better. And being better at search isn't enough anyway [1]. Also, when you give Google less of your searches, personalization drops off and it gets even worse, but most people give all their searches to google so they see the benefit of personalization if they compare.

[1] When Yahoo did user research on search, one of their findings was that if you asked users which results were better, there was a strong and consistent preference towards results that were shown as Google results, regardless of the actual results. It's been forever since I saw those reports, so I don't remember the numbers, and the numbers are likely different today anyway, but that's a huge barrier to adoption that you have to manage.

One of the things I pay Kagi for is to avoid the "benefit" of personalization.

I mean, there's "benefits", but there's also benefits. A lot of computer words are also words in other contexts. At least when I stopped using Google search as my primary search, it had figured out I wanted the computer words. That's pretty useful, and I kind of miss it.

Is it a though? Just bc 99% of population don’t notice or care about misinformation, does it mean the majority consensus is right?

Which do you think is more abundant, lies or truths?

It's not the same everywhere. Look at ru and cz, and note that cn and jp are missing from the list, where Google will likewise probably not be at the top.

There are zero Asian countries on this besides Russia and India. Thereby missing about 2 billion internet users

Pretty sure Google is the market leader is Japan. By far.

"Market share without Google" is the funniest little capsule of copium I have seen in a long time.

I highly doubt these numbers.

I see how (in Italy/Poland) me, my friends and relatives have turned towards Gemini for the lots of queries.

People walking around the streets and asking Gemini for restaurants, directions or any general questions is starting to be extremely common, but I doubt that Cloudflare can measure those (afterall it never goes through a browser since Gemini app is embedded in the home button of Android phones).

I also doubt that Cloudflare measures the gargantuan amount of queries people do through, e.g., their AI desktop apps or stuff like Claude Code, that effectively replaces google searches.

I really want to know how many search requests are being made by ChatGPT and other AI systems in 2025. I know OpenAI has a partnership with Bing for this, but then I see OpenAI in the list on the post.

Do we know if they're sending the referer header? Maybe there is no way to know. It would just be interesting to see that trend over time.

From a personal experience, at least 50% of my Google searches moved to ChatGPT and Claude. Since, I saw many similar transitions with my friends and coworkers, I was expecting higher numbers for OpenAI.

Do you see a similar transition in your network?

Do you often ask questions that lead you to a link? I use LLMs heavily but still use google when looking for a link.

Depends on the questions.

If a technical problem, before my questions were leading either to official doc or stackoverflow, now I get possible solutions to try

Other types of questions like reviews, product comparisons GPT shows couple of relevant links to reddit and I go check them to see if summary was right and then surf relevant subreddit.

If I assign a number, I would say 80% of my requests lead to answers inside the GPT, other 20% lead to links

This is tracking opening links ? AI summarizes the content so you don't even have to visit the site.

But they provide sources/links, which I click occasionally and they have utm source with chatgpt

which explains the low number of those in stats

It's very nice to see all the details. Two things came to my attention. In countries like Turkey or Eastern European ones, Google adoption doesn't change regardless of what platform they are on, pushing nearly 90% on every device. In the USA, Windows users actually prefer Bing a little more.

Does this mean other countries are better at using computers/more conscious users, and changing the default search engine/browser? It might be related to Edge being the default for Windows computers, but this is overridden by the users in other countries. Or is it because Microsoft is pushing more ads and is trusted more in the USA?

The second question is how much OpenAI disrupted the overall Google traffic. That's probably the most important metric anyone wants to see.

It could be because of culture. Turkish people have much stronger pack mentality and “do what everyone else does or else” perspective

Kagi didn’t even make the list? I’ve completely switched away from Google and only use Kagi…

Kagi’s response headers make it such that they cannot be included in this report

Kagi is very open about how many users they have:

https://kagi.com/stats

~56,000 users spread across the entire world isn't going to move the needle when looking at the sort of statistics in the report.

Sometimes you're in a bubble. I'm in some niche fiction communities, and we can get some really warped perceptions about what people like to read because we are so deep in our own niche.

Apparently there is only a single country from the list where Google is not the first player: Russia (Yandex). China and most Asia are not listed.

And the only country where Google has less than 90% market share and the 2nd options is not Bing: Czechia (Seznam).

Other countries with less that 90% Google market share are: Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Switzerland, United States (Bing)

This is total domination, other engines are literal rounding errors. And this isn't a new thing. So it is weird that anti-monopol investigations into Google were so anemic so far.

Why are there no Asian countries measured besides India and Russia?

> The strategy we use relies on the referer header we see when we get an HTTP/S request.

This is interesting data but is not really a useful estimate of search engine market share in 2025.

And one that would understate privacy-focused search engines, because the people using those are far less likely to be sending useful referrers.

What search engines don't send referrer headers?

I was expecting DDG to be one of them (before I read the report), so I did some digging and it seems that they have <https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/...> set to "origin", meaning it says that the request came from duckduckgo.com but nothing further

  <meta name="referrer" content="origin">

But, to answer your question, presumably a search engine that wanted to stay really under the radar could use that same mechanism to choose "no-referrer" and the traffic would seem organic

(I also had a good chuckle at them choosing to break the typo chain with this directive)

Referrers (or cross-domain referrers) can be easily disabled in the browser - it's not just up to the search engine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com