Overview
- DuckDuckGo says U.S. mobile installs rose an average of 18.1% week‑over‑week following Google’s May 19 I/O announcements, with iOS installs averaging 33% growth and short‑term peaks much higher.
- Visits to DuckDuckGo’s noai.duckduckgo.com, which disables AI answers by default, climbed about 22.7% on average and peaked near 27.7% in the days after Google I/O.
- The company publicly framed the surge as a U.S. response to Google’s new Gemini‑powered AI Mode and AI Overviews and used social posts to highlight single‑day install spikes of roughly 30%.
- DuckDuckGo still offers optional AI tools such as Duck.ai that let users choose LLM models while saying it strips identifying data and does not use prompts to train providers.
- Despite the short‑term bump, DuckDuckGo remains a small player at roughly 2% U.S. search share compared with Google’s roughly 85%, so the shift shows user reaction but not a near‑term threat to Google’s dominance.