DuckDuckGo’s organic search growth is outpacing other search engines, with particularly strong gains reported in mobile search.
On mobile devices, DuckDuckGo’s organic search visits are up 78% year-over-year. Overall search visits are up 54%.
By comparison, Google’s total organic search visits fell 2% year-over-year in Q1 2019. However, Google’s mobile search visits grew 6%.
Bing and Yahoo saw either neutral or negative growth in Q1 2019.
This data was revealed in Merkle’s Q1 2019 Digital Marketing Report, which also includes statistics about paid search, social, and Amazon ads.
In this post, I will highlight the key findings related to organic search.
Organic Search in Q1 2019
Organic search produced 26% of all visits and 24% of mobile website visits in Q1 2019.
Total site visits produced by organic search declined by about 2% in Q1 2019.
On phones, organic search visits were up 13% while desktop visits fell 13% and tablet visits fell 12%.
Phones accounted for over 50% of all organic search visits in Q1 2019, which is a first-ever milestone.
Merkle adds that this past quarter’s desktop visit decline was the largest since Q4 2016.
Google’s share of total US organic search visits was 93% in Q1 2019, up a point from last year.
On mobile devices, Google produced 96% of organic search visits. Google’s Organic search visits on mobile devices are up 6% year-over-year.
The study notes that the share of traffic from mobile for Google and DuckDuckGo are nearly identical.
“In Q1 2019, both saw mobile account for 62% of organic search visits. This is impressive for DuckDuckGo because it did not enjoy the same default search engine status as Google does on iOS and Android devices.”
For more data related to paid search and organic & paid social in Q4 2018, download the full report here.
