Is Bing now driving more traffic after the launch of its AI chatbot?

Microsoft was immensely proud of having been the first major search engine to release an AI chatbot, and rightly so. Despite Google claiming itself to be an “AI First Company”, it was slow to release its AI chatbot and was well and truly beaten to it by Microsoft, having implemented a chatbot into its Bing search engine in February, then forcing Google to release its competing chatbot a month later.

Microsoft had certainly seen this as an opportunity to potentially steal some search market share from Google. Despite Microsoft’s attempts and resources, Bing only has a 6% share of the US search market, and 4% of the UK. Those are very low numbers but Microsoft was anticipating an increase in search share based on its implementation of Bing AI.

However, although Bing usage has reportedly increased, this is not translating into an increase in search traffic to websites. Having spent some time seeing the evolution of Bing traffic to some of my websites today, it looks like it’s very varied, some are up and some are down. In the best case, one of my sites has seen an increase of 16% in traffic from Bing over the last month, compared to last year. However, although this may sound impressive, it’s still only 4% of the overall traffic. Most of the rest is from Google.

It’s early days but I think this reflects that for those of us who are in the industry, or related industries, we are constantly playing with these tools and looking for opportunities, we are in a slight bubble as users in general are not rushing to try out these new AI tools….just yet. We’ll keep monitoring the traffic from Bing but right now, I don’t envisage any change to the status quo, not for some time yet anyway.

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