New Bing attracts new Edge users – who then use Google Search

People who rushed to download the Microsoft Edge browser to try out the New Bing Chat experience – ironically – ended up using Google Search on Edge, according to new data from enterprise SEO platform BrightEdge.

Why we care. We’re watching closely for any data indicating whether the New Bing is starting to chip away at Google’s massive lead in search. What we see here is more evidence that Microsoft is driving more traffic to sites – in a twist, they’re doing it via Edge instead of Bing.

What the Edge data shows. For its analysis, BrightEdge examined more than 600,000 million visits to websites across all major industries, comparing U.S. traffic from Google and Bing, by browser (Chrome vs. Edge).

Google in Edge fairly consistently sent just over 3 million visits to websites since the start of 2023. Starting around Feb. 26, however, there is a noticeable uptick in Google traffic coming from the Edge browser (3.4 million). That number grew to more than 3.6 million visits by the week of March 12.

Meanwhile, traffic from Bing in Edge also showed some growth since the start of the year (from just over 5 million to about 5.4 million as of the week of March 12, peaking at more than 5.6 million the week of Feb. 26), but the data seems to show that as more traffic started coming from Google in Edge, less came from Bing in Edge.

What the Chrome data shows. Traffic from Bing in Chrome has also been steadily growing week on week in 2023 – from 490,365 (the week of Jan. 8) to 650,065 (the week of March 12). Meanwhile, Google in Chrome sent between 80 million and 84 million visits during the same timeframe.

Google gains an Edge. More than 1 million people signed up within the first 48 hours to try out the new Bing in February, but ended up stuck on a waitlist, in some cases for weeks.

So all those people who downloaded Edge stuck with it. But when it came to searching, rather than using Bing, many started using Google Search on Edge.

One big question we will be better able to answer months from now is whether limiting the integration of GPT-4 into Bing Chat solely on the Edge browser was a missed opportunity. We just don’t have that data yet.

“It is still early to predict how Google and Bing will evolve and if there is a significant market dominance shift,” said Lemuel Park, BrightEdge co-founder and CTO. “However, Bing will undoubtedly increase in popularity as more and more people experiment with its new capabilities.”

More data. The new Bing making (small) gains on Google Search has some additional data, including page visits on Bing rising 15.8% and Bing becoming a more significant referral source for some publishers.