Copy article

DuckDuckGo install rate up 30%. Are search users casting their vote?

ended 28. May 2026

DuckDuckGo's US app installs jumped 30% in days after Google announced its search engine would become a conversational AI engine that answers questions directly instead of returning links. Within the week, iOS installs hit 69.9% growth. Visits to DuckDuckGo's AI-free search page grew 22.7% week-on-week. Apptopia independently confirmed a 29% rise in US daily downloads.

The numbers are small. DuckDuckGo holds roughly 2% of US search and under 1% in the UK. Google's own AI search mode has passed one billion monthly users, but a growing number are walking away to alternatives like Brave Search, Startpage, Yahoo, Ecosia, SearXng, and Mojeek after trying it.

Privacy is part of it. Google's "Personal Intelligence" connects AI search to Gmail and Photos. Google's own retention policy confirms it stores some account data for the life of the account. Web & App Activity, which logs every search, is on by default, and for accounts created before June 2020, that data is kept indefinitely unless the user manually intervenes.

Accuracy matters too. An Oumi study reported by the New York Times found AI Overviews are wrong 9% of the time, tens of millions of incorrect answers per hour at Google's scale. Users aren't getting the source material. They're getting a confident, unverifiable summary of it, placed above the actual sources if they appear at all.

Advertising accounts for roughly 75% of Alphabet's £318 billion annual revenue. The redesigned search keeps users inside an AI conversation controlled by Google rather than clicking through to independent publishers. The change is mandatory and can't be toggled off.

We'd like your views:

  • AI Overviews are wrong tens of millions of times per hour. Should users have to opt in to AI answers, or is this a consumer protection issue?
  • Google earns £233 billion a year from ads. Would that be an incentive to manage the search experience for Google's advantage, or the end users'?
  • The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) gave Google strategic market status and proposed choice screens. Does that go far enough when the real issue is whether anyone consented to AI replacing their results?
  • DuckDuckGo lets users turn off AI search. Will Google have to do the same?

3 responses from the Newspage community

Copy all

Star Quote
Copy

Colette Mason
AI Ethics Consultant at Clever Clogs AI
91% accuracy sounds like a pass with distinction until you remember Google built its entire reputation on being the place you go to get the right answer, fast. That was the contract. Not "right most of the time." Not "probably accurate."

To "google" became a verb because people trusted it to return what they were looking for. Now, it's returning what its AI thinks the user meant, and getting it wrong tens of millions of times per hour.

At five trillion searches a year, 9% isn't a rounding error, it's a critical user journey and task failure fuelling the spread of more misinformation.

Businesses spent years and 1000s of pounds building websites, investing in SEO, earning their way to the top of results. Google just moved the goalposts and put an AI summary above the lot. Those businesses didn't get consulted. They got buried. And that's before you consider what happens to every query you type, potentially stored, profiled, and fed into an ad engine that generates £233 bn a year.
Copy

Editor
Mitali Deypurkaystha
AI Governance Strategist & CMO at AISensa
Six in ten users now want an AI off-switch on search, according to a Gartner survey, and DuckDuckGo’s 30% download surge suggests people are starting to vote with their thumbs against forced AI. Google built its empire on giving users the best links on the internet, but AI search flips that model on its head by replacing choice with a confident summary users can’t properly verify. If a smaller rival like DuckDuckGo can let people turn AI answers off, consumers will inevitably ask why the world’s biggest search engine won’t do the same. This is drifting beyond a tech debate and into a consumer-rights issue, because millions of users never explicitly agreed to hand over traditional search for an AI gatekeeper that’s wrong 9% of the time. The real danger for Google is that people stop seeing AI search as innovation and start seeing it as the moment the internet became something done to them rather than for them.
Copy

Premium
Debbie Porter
Managing Director at Destination Digital Marketing
Google doubled down on AI adoption for their advertising platform at last week’s Google Marketing Live event.

I’ve been working in Google Ads for over 15 years - the move to PMax and then subsequently AI Max campaigns within the ads platform has been a railroading that most PPC professionals don’t want. At GML, four major announcements were made, two of which related to adopting AI in Google Ads. PPC professionals gather in communities to share knowledge on avoiding this kind of dumbed down advertising - because it’s in the best interests of our clients.

AI search answers for consumers are wrong 9% of the time, but the percentage of off-target ads served with Google Ads AI mode is much higher.

However, in order to bid on ads within Google AI mode you must run PMax and AI Max campaigns. So a suppression of source links in AI answers on Google search makes perfect sense if Google Ads’ master plan is to push advertisers into spending money on winning links within that environment.