TL;DR
DuckDuckGo installs surged 18% after Google’s AI search overhaul. Apple device installs peaked at 70%. Its AI-free search page traffic rose 23%.
DuckDuckGo US app installs jumped by an average of 18% week over week between 20 and 25 May. The growth sustained for six consecutive days, peaking at 30% on Memorial Day Monday. On Apple devices, weekly install growth reached 33%, with a single-day peak of almost 70%.
The surge came days after Google announced sweeping changes to its search engine at I/O 2026. The company plans to replace its traditional list of blue links with AI-powered tools that answer questions directly, complete tasks, and run background monitoring agents. Some users saw this as the end of the search experience they had used for two decades.
Traffic to DuckDuckGo’s AI-free search page, noai.duckduckgo.com, also rose. Visitor numbers averaged 23% growth week over week, peaking at 28% on Sunday. The page disables AI-generated answers entirely, giving users the plain results list that Google is moving away from.
“Google is force-feeding AI with no way to opt out,” CEO Gabriel Weinberg said. “As a result their results are getting worse, not better.” He said the company believes frustrated users are actively seeking alternatives.
The exodus accelerated after it was revealed earlier this month that Google Chrome is installing a 4 GB AI model called Gemini Nano on user devices without explicit permission or notification. The combination of mandatory AI in search and undisclosed AI models on devices created a trust problem that DuckDuckGo is directly benefiting from.
DuckDuckGo is not positioning itself as anti-AI. “We want to be the place that puts users in charge and allows them to decide how much or how little AI they want,” Weinberg said. The company operates its own AI service, duck.ai, which provides access to models from Anthropic, Meta, Mistral, and OpenAI while promising private conversations that are not used for training.
The distinction is choice versus compulsion. Google is making AI the default with no opt-out. DuckDuckGo is offering AI as an option alongside a traditional search experience. The users moving between the two are not necessarily anti-AI. They are anti-mandatory.
The shift from traditional search to AI-generated answers is creating new business categories. Peec AI hit $10 million ARR in six months by helping brands track their visibility in ChatGPT and other AI search results. The same structural change that is driving DuckDuckGo installs is driving demand for generative engine optimisation tools.
Apple’s iOS 27 will let users choose rival AI models for Siri queries and set third-party services as defaults for streaming. The direction across the industry is toward user choice on AI, not mandatory integration. Google is moving in the opposite direction.
DuckDuckGo partly relies on search results supplied by Microsoft’s Bing index, alongside its own web crawler and other sources. Some Google sceptics regard the Bing dependency with suspicion. But the company adds its own privacy protections and ranking systems on top of the underlying infrastructure.
The numbers are small relative to Google’s scale. DuckDuckGo has roughly 3% of the US search market. An 18% increase in installs does not threaten Google’s dominance. But the signal matters more than the share. When a search engine’s biggest product announcement in years sends users to a competitor, the product is solving a problem the users did not ask to have.
Google’s Gemini has grown its share of AI web traffic from 5.7% to 21.5% over the past twelve months. ChatGPT’s share declined from 86.7% to 64.5%. The AI search market is expanding rapidly. The question is whether Google’s decision to merge AI into its core search product will accelerate that expansion or accelerate the departure of users who wanted search, not an AI assistant they did not request.
