Bing held 12.21% of global desktop search in March 2025, according to StatCounter figures summarized by Statista and reported by Windows Latest. Google held 79.10%. That desktop number is the one most marketers have never seen, because the headline figure people quote is the all-device share, where Bing sits under 4%.
Both numbers are true. They describe different behavior. On phones, Google holds nearly the whole market. On desktops, where people work, research purchases, write reports and use Windows and Edge, Bing has a real and growing slice. And since 2023, Bing has mattered for a second reason that market share does not capture: its index feeds a set of AI assistants and search products that never show the Bing logo.
Below are the Bing statistics that matter for anyone planning search and AI visibility in 2026, with sources, followed by a simple framework for deciding how much effort Bing deserves.
Bing’s share of search, by device
StatCounter is the most cited source for search share, and its numbers show a split picture. Across all platforms, Windows Central reported Bing at 3.96% of global search in mid-2025, up from 2.97% in 2023. Google, in the same comparison, fell from 92.38% to 89.71%. A footnote in the Windows Latest piece put the all-platform figures at 3.88% for Bing and 89.66% for Google in its March 2025 snapshot.
Those are small numbers for Bing, and they are the reason many SEO teams ignore it. But they are dragged down by mobile, where Google is the default on Android and on Safari. On desktop, the picture changes, which is the subject of the next section.
One caution on all share data: StatCounter measures page views from sites that run its tracking code. It is a sample, not a census. Microsoft’s own executives tend to cite Comscore for US numbers, which measures differently. Use any single figure as a direction, not a precise count.
Desktop is where Bing lives
StatCounter’s yearly averages for global desktop search, as published in the Windows Latest summary, show a steady climb for Bing: 6.14% in 2020, 6.45% in 2021, 8.65% in 2022, 8.67% in 2023 and 11.32% in 2024. The first quarter of 2025 averaged 12.00%.
Windows Central reported a similar trend, with Bing’s global desktop share rising from 8.58% to 11.8% between 2023 and 2025.
Why desktop? Bing is the default search engine in Microsoft Edge and in the Windows search box, and Windows still runs most of the world’s work computers. Many corporate IT departments leave those defaults in place. The result is a Bing audience that skews toward people searching during the workday, on work machines, often for business purchases. For B2B companies, that audience is worth far more than the all-device share suggests.
Bing’s revenue and ad numbers
Microsoft does not break out Bing as a separate business, but it does report search and news advertising revenue. For the fiscal quarter ending June 30, 2025, Microsoft reported that search and news advertising revenue, excluding traffic acquisition costs, grew 21% year over year.
The company has also been explicit about what share is worth. In February 2023, Microsoft’s then-CFO of Windows and devices, Phil Ockenden, said each point of search advertising share Microsoft gains is about a $2 billion revenue opportunity. That explains why Microsoft keeps investing in Bing despite its small all-device share: the economics of even modest gains are large.
Microsoft Advertising serves ads across what it calls the Microsoft Search Network, which includes Bing, Yahoo, AOL and partner sites. Advertisers who run campaigns there often report lower cost per click than on Google, because fewer advertisers compete for each query. That gap varies by industry, so test it with your own campaigns rather than trusting averages.
Copilot and the AI layer
In February 2023, Microsoft launched an AI chat experience inside Bing, built with OpenAI’s models. By November 2023, Microsoft had folded it into the Copilot brand. In March 2023, Microsoft’s consumer marketing chief Yusuf Mehdi said Bing had passed 100 million daily active users for the first time, crediting the new chat feature for part of the jump.
Copilot now appears across Windows, Edge, Microsoft 365 and its own apps. When Copilot answers a question that needs fresh information from the web, it grounds that answer in Bing search results. Pages Bing cannot find or does not trust are far less likely to show up as Copilot sources.
You can test your own Copilot visibility in ten minutes. Open Copilot and ask three questions a buyer in your category would ask: who are the best providers of what you sell, what does a typical solution cost, and how does your company compare with a named competitor. Note whether your brand appears, what it says about you, and which sources it cites. Then search the same questions on bing.com. In most cases the cited pages overlap a great deal with Bing’s top organic results, which tells you that improving your Bing rankings and your Copilot answers is in large part the same job.
That is the shift that makes Bing statistics matter more in 2026 than they did five years ago. Bing is no longer only a search engine with a small audience. It is a retrieval layer for a family of AI products.
Bing powers more answers than you think
Bing’s reach extends well past bing.com. Yahoo has used Bing’s search results since the Microsoft and Yahoo search alliance that began in 2009. DuckDuckGo says Bing is a main source of its traditional web links, alongside its own crawler and other sources. Windows search and Edge’s address bar send queries to Bing by default.
On the AI side, OpenAI has said ChatGPT search draws on third-party search providers alongside its own technology, and Bing has been reported by many outlets as one of them since the companies’ partnership began. Microsoft also licensed Bing data to developers through its Bing Search APIs for years, though it announced in 2025 that those APIs would be retired in favor of grounding through its own AI agent services.
The practical takeaway: a page that is well indexed in Bing has a shot at appearing across more surfaces than any one market share figure implies.
Who uses Bing
Bing’s audience is shaped by its defaults. Because it ships with Windows and Edge, it over-indexes on desktop users, on people searching from work machines, and on users who never changed the factory settings on their computer. That last group tends to be older and less likely to switch tools. Microsoft’s ad sales materials have long pitched the Bing audience as higher-income and more likely to make purchase decisions at work.
Treat audience claims from any search engine’s ad team with some caution. But the structural point holds without them: an audience that searches from desktops, during work hours, is a strong fit for B2B services, professional software, financial services and considered purchases.
There is one more audience worth naming: the people who never choose a search engine at all. Every time someone types into the Windows search box and gets a web result, or asks a question in the Edge sidebar, Bing answers. Those queries seldom show up in anyone’s mental model of “Bing users,” yet they add up to a steady stream of searches from people who would call themselves as Google users.
Bing Webmaster Tools and IndexNow
Bing Webmaster Tools is free and takes about five minutes to set up if you already use Google Search Console, because it can import verified sites directly from Google’s tool. It reports crawl errors, indexed pages, keywords and backlinks, and it includes a site scan for technical SEO issues.
The tool also gives you something Google Search Console does not: a clear view of how a second major index sees your site. Pages that rank well in Google but are missing from Bing often share a technical cause, such as blocked resources, thin internal linking or slow server responses that Bing’s crawler tolerates less. Fixing them helps both engines.
IndexNow, launched in October 2021 by Microsoft Bing and Yandex, is an open protocol that lets a site tell participating search engines the moment a URL is added, updated or deleted. Instead of waiting for a crawler to return, you push a notification. Many content management systems and SEO plugins now support it with a toggle. For news sites, ecommerce catalogs and any site that publishes daily, IndexNow can shorten the gap between publishing and appearing in Bing, and by extension in the AI products that rely on it.
The Bing Reach Ratio
We use a simple measure called the Bing Reach Ratio to explain why Bing deserves more attention than its share suggests. It compares how many surfaces your Bing presence affects with how many tools you need to manage it.
Count the surfaces: Bing itself, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo’s traditional links, Microsoft Copilot, Windows search, Edge’s address bar suggestions, and ChatGPT search to the extent it draws on Bing. That is seven. Now count the tools needed to manage your presence in all of them: one Bing Webmaster Tools account, with IndexNow switched on. The ratio is seven to one.
The ratio is not a precise measurement. Each surface weighs Bing’s index differently, and some, like ChatGPT, use several sources at once. But it captures the practical point: the effort to be well represented in Bing is small and fixed, while the number of places that effort shows up keeps growing as more AI products ground their answers in web search.
Compare that with Google, where one Search Console account manages one search engine and its AI features. Google’s audience is much larger, so it still deserves most of the effort. But per hour of work, Bing optimization reaches an unusual number of places.
What these numbers mean for your 2026 plan
Four actions follow from the data. First, verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools if you have not, and import from Search Console to save time. Second, turn on IndexNow so new and updated pages reach Bing fast. Third, check how your brand appears when you ask Copilot about your category, since its answers draw on what Bing has indexed and trusts. Fourth, if you sell to businesses, test a small Microsoft Advertising campaign aimed at desktop users during work hours and compare its cost per lead with your Google campaigns.
None of this replaces Google work. It adds a channel that most competitors still treat as an afterthought, and the Bing statistics above suggest that is a mistake.
When did your team last open Bing Webmaster Tools?