Bing lost an estimated 20.13 billion browser visits in the twelve months to September 2026, a 45.64% fall that makes Microsoft's search engine the biggest decliner on OneLittleWeb's ranking of the world's most visited websites. The ranking carries no publication date. Its description says "Updated September 2026", and its data window runs from October 2025 to September 2026. Over that period, according to OneLittleWeb, the 7,202 websites it tracks drew 3.89 trillion visits, down 1.06% on the previous twelve months, and Google alone took 1.21 trillion of them.
ChatGPT now sits fifth, with 70.78 billion visits after a 35.86% rise. Yet the AI services that the dashboard measures as traffic sources sent only 7.46 billion visits to the tracked sites over the same twelve months. That is about 0.2% of the total. Search engines sent 481.30 billion.
In Short
OneLittleWeb, a company that sells search engine optimization services, used estimates from traffic-measurement tools to rank the world's 7,202 most visited websites between October 2025 and September 2026, and its numbers show Bing's visits nearly halving while ChatGPT climbed to fifth place. If you run a website, the same estimates say AI chatbots sent only about 0.2% of all visits, while search engines sent more than 60 times as many. These are estimates of browser visits rather than official counts, and Microsoft has said Bing's audience share has grown, so the two pictures do not match.
What the dashboard counts
OneLittleWeb presents the page as a recurring product. "This monthly dashboard tracks 7,202 of the world's most visited websites," according to the company. None of the figures come from the websites' own server logs. "Our website traffic analysis is based on estimated data from third-party analytics providers," the methodology section states, naming SEMrush, Ahrefs and Aitools.xyz as those providers. Both Semrush and Ahrefs build such estimates from clickstream panels, DNS data and other indirect signals, as PPC Land noted when it covered OneLittleWeb's AI tools study in September.
A handful of definitions shape every number on the page. Visits are browser-based; mobile app activity is excluded, so services with large app audiences are measured only through their websites. Visits are also not people. "A returning visitor may be counted more than once if they visit again," the methodology says. Large brands can appear on several rows when the providers measure their domains separately, which is why Google, Gmail at mail.google.com and Google Docs at docs.google.com each hold their own position. Market share, in OneLittleWeb's definition, is "The share of all tracked visits that went to this website in the selected period." The data refreshes "every month after the previous calendar month is complete," according to the FAQ, and the default view is a rolling twelve months.
Industry labels come from the providers, not from OneLittleWeb. That is why YouTube sits under Search Engines. Asked why on its own FAQ, the company answers: "Because that is how the providers behind this dataset classify it." The effect is large. The Search Engines industry total of 2.01 trillion visits, 51.63% of all tracked traffic, includes YouTube's 622.21 billion. Remove YouTube and roughly 1.39 trillion visits remain for search engines in the usual sense, of which Google accounts for about 87%, by PPC Land's calculation.
Gaps in the page
Some numbers on the page do not line up. The introduction cites coverage of "29+ industries" and "163+ countries", while the country table runs to 222 countries. The country shares also appear to use a different base from the rest of the page: the United States' 911.78 billion visits are given as 25.13% of traffic, which implies a total of about 3.63 trillion visits rather than 3.89 trillion. Japan's figures produce the same base. The page does not explain the difference.
The panel itself has changed. When PPC Land wrote about the AI tools study on September 3, OneLittleWeb's Most Popular Websites dashboard tracked 10,173 domains and recorded 3.44 trillion visits for the twelve months to April 2026. The current version tracks 2,971 fewer websites, about 29% fewer, yet records about 13% more visits, over a window that overlaps the earlier one by seven months. OneLittleWeb does not say which sites were removed or whether earlier estimates were revised, so the two versions cannot be compared directly.
Who publishes it
OneLittleWeb sells search engine optimization, link building and digital PR services, with offices in Queens, New York, and Dhaka, Bangladesh, according to its website. The ranking page carries no byline; PPC Land's earlier coverage identified Sujan Sarkar as the person who runs the agency. The page invites reuse of its numbers, asking for credit to One Little Web, Digital Market Intelligence, a link, the period named and the figures described as estimates. Semrush, the first provider it names, agreed in November 2025 to be acquired by Adobe for $1.9 billion in cash.
Google and YouTube take 47% of tracked visits
"Google and Youtube captured 47.12% of all tracked web visits worldwide in the last 12 months," according to OneLittleWeb. Google recorded 1.21 trillion visits, a 31.11% share and a 1.64% increase. YouTube followed with 622.21 billion, a 16.01% share, after growing 9.74%. The twenty largest entries, as OneLittleWeb lists them:
| Rank | Website | Industry | Visits, Oct 2025 to Sep 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Search Engines | 1.21 trillion | +1.64% | |
| 2 | YouTube | Search Engines | 622.21 billion | +9.74% |
| 3 | Social Media | 117.08 billion | -2.19% | |
| 4 | Social Media | 74.06 billion | +7.46% | |
| 5 | ChatGPT | AI Tool | 70.78 billion | +35.86% |
| 6 | Social Media | 61.71 billion | +7.32% | |
| 7 | Wikipedia | Education and Research | 51.12 billion | -14.81% |
| 8 | X (Twitter) | Social Media | 46.95 billion | +4.81% |
| 9 | Gmail | Communication | 45.24 billion | +9.73% |
| 10 | Social Media | 35.00 billion | +3.85% | |
| 11 | Google Docs | Software | 31.03 billion | +11.21% |
| 12 | Amazon | E-Commerce | 28.97 billion | -15.79% |
| 13 | Yahoo! | Search Engines | 28.28 billion | -22.10% |
| 14 | TikTok | Social Media | 27.89 billion | +11.10% |
| 15 | Bing | Search Engines | 23.97 billion | -45.64% |
| 16 | DuckDuckGo | Search Engines | 23.73 billion | -4.69% |
| 17 | Yahoo! Japan | Search Engines | 22.30 billion | -12.53% |
| 18 | Social Media | 18.42 billion | +6.48% | |
| 19 | Weather.com | Weather | 17.51 billion | -1.65% |
| 20 | MSN | News and Media | 16.76 billion | -1.42% |
Add Gmail and Google Docs to Google and YouTube, and Google-owned domains in the top 20 account for about 1.91 trillion visits, roughly 49% of everything tracked, by PPC Land's calculation from the rounded figures. Meta's three entries - Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp - total about 226 billion visits, or around 5.8%. Facebook was the only one of the three to shrink.
OneLittleWeb ranks its movers by volume rather than by rate. "These rankings are based on absolute rolling 12-month visit growth, not percentage growth," the FAQ explains. On that basis the largest gains went to YouTube (plus 55.21 billion visits), Google (plus 19.52 billion), ChatGPT (plus 18.68 billion), Gemini (plus 9.40 billion) and Claude (plus 7.13 billion). The largest losses were at Bing (minus 20.13 billion), Wikipedia (minus 8.88 billion), Yahoo! (minus 8.02 billion), Amazon (minus 5.43 billion) and Google Play (minus 5.27 billion, a 38% decline).
Bing's 45.64% fall and the figures that disagree
On OneLittleWeb's numbers, bing.com drew 23.97 billion visits in the twelve months to September 2026. Working back from the reported decline, that implies about 44.10 billion a year earlier. Bing now ranks 15th, below Yahoo! at 28.28 billion, which itself fell 22.10%. DuckDuckGo, down a more modest 4.69%, sits just 240 million visits behind Bing at 23.73 billion. Yahoo! Japan lost 12.53%. Between them, Bing and Yahoo! shed 28.15 billion visits, more than the 18.68 billion ChatGPT added, though the page draws no connection between the two movements.
What happened to Bing? The page does not say. Other measurements, each of a different thing, give only partial support. Datos' Q1 2026 State of Search report found Bing's share of US desktop searches peaked at 5.33% in December 2025 before falling back to roughly 3.2% to 3.8%. That is a drop of between 29% and 40% within three months, by PPC Land's calculation, but it is measured as a share of desktop searches and starts from a single peak month. SparkToro and Datos put Bing at 4.31% of US desktop searches in the fourth quarter of 2025, against 73.7% for Google. Cloudflare's 2025 Year in Review gave Bing 3.1% of search engine referrals, behind Google at 89.5%.
Microsoft's own account runs the other way. When it reported results for the quarter to June 30, 2026, search advertising revenue excluding traffic acquisition costs grew 10%, and chief executive Satya Nadella said Bing and Edge had gained audience share in search and advertising for five consecutive years. Revenue, share of searches and share of referrals are not the same measure as estimated browser visits to a single domain. Only Datos records a decline, over three months rather than a full year, and OneLittleWeb's methodology notes that a brand's traffic can be split across separately measured rows. Its top 20 includes only two other Microsoft-owned domains, MSN and LinkedIn.
ChatGPT climbs to fifth as Gemini and Claude multiply
ChatGPT's 70.78 billion visits put it ahead of Reddit (61.71 billion), Wikipedia (51.12 billion) and X (46.95 billion), and at nearly three times Bing's total. The broader AI Tool industry drew 159.57 billion visits, 4.11% of tracked traffic, after growing 32.14%. It is the sixth-largest industry on the page, behind Search Engines, Social Media, News and Media, E-Commerce and Software.
ChatGPT accounts for about 44% of AI Tool visits, by PPC Land's calculation. OneLittleWeb gives Gemini 7.2% of the category and Claude 5.3%, which implies roughly 11.5 billion and 8.5 billion visits respectively; DeepSeek holds 2.4% and Perplexity 1.4%. Gemini grew 433% and Claude 527%, from bases of roughly 2.2 billion and 1.4 billion visits. Together, ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude added 35.21 billion visits - about 91% of the AI Tool industry's estimated growth of 38.8 billion, by PPC Land's calculation.
OneLittleWeb's separate AI tools dashboard offers an earlier reading. For the twelve months to April 2026, it put ChatGPT at 64.7 billion visits (up 69.80%), Gemini at 6.9 billion (up 450.33%) and Claude at 3.4 billion (up 250.07%). Set against the current figures, ChatGPT's growth rate roughly halved between the two windows while Claude's more than doubled. The windows overlap and the datasets differ, so the comparison is indicative only.
Other measurement companies describe the same reshuffle with different denominators. Similarweb put ChatGPT at 52.7% of worldwide generative AI website traffic in late May 2026, down from 76.4% a year earlier, with Gemini at 27.3% and Claude at 8.9%. Comscore found ChatGPT's share of US prompts fell from 70% to 50% between January and June 2026, while Gemini rose from 17% to 30% and Claude from 2% to 11%. Similarweb also measured 950 million visits to claude.ai in August 2026, up from 148 million a year earlier. Gemini's position is the hardest to read from browser data alone: the Gemini app passed 900 million monthly users in May 2026, and app activity is outside OneLittleWeb's scope.
AI sent 0.2% of visits
The traffic-source breakdown is where the dashboard says most about how people reach websites. "Direct and Search accounted for 92.1% of all tracked visits worldwide in the last 12 months," according to OneLittleWeb. The full split for October 2025 to September 2026:
| Source | Visits | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Direct | 3.10 trillion | 79.7% |
| Search | 481.30 billion | 12.4% |
| Referral | 230.50 billion | 5.9% |
| Social | 52.71 billion | 1.4% |
| AI Traffic | 7.05 billion | 0.2% |
| Google AI Mode | 409.73 million | 0.0% |
| Other | 17.52 billion | 0.5% |
Direct visits fell 2.47% year on year. OneLittleWeb explains their dominance as habit: "People type URLs, use bookmarks, open saved links, or return to websites they already know." Social media, for all its attention, sent just 52.71 billion visits. "Social platforms are large attention channels, but they do not always send users out to external websites," the FAQ says.
AI sources sent less still. OneLittleWeb combines the AI Traffic channel, which it says covers chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity, with Google's AI Mode, for a total of 7.46 billion visits. AI Mode's 409.73 million visits make up about 5.5% of that. On PPC Land's arithmetic, search engines sent about 64 times as many visits as AI services over the period, and social platforms about seven times as many. The company's own explanation is short: "People may use AI tools heavily, but much of that activity stays inside the AI product itself." That is the chatbot version of zero-click search, in which an answer arrives without a visit to anyone's website.
One ratio captures the imbalance. AI Tool websites received 159.57 billion visits as destinations, while AI services sent 7.46 billion visits onward to tracked websites - roughly one outbound visit for every 21 inbound, by PPC Land's calculation. The two figures do not cover exactly the same set of services, but the gap is wide.
The result fits a pattern seen in other datasets. Ahrefs estimated in February that ChatGPT handles about 12% of Google's search volume yet sends about 190 times less traffic to websites. Microsoft Clarity found that AI referrals grew 155.6% over eight months but stayed under 1% of traffic across 1,277 publisher domains. Chartbeat data published by Axios in March showed ChatGPT referrals to publishers up more than 200% between December 2024 and December 2025, yet still under 1% of total page views.
What the AI figure may miss
AI-driven visits do not always arrive with an AI label. Similarweb traced visits that followed an AI recommendation and found 55.9% arrived through search, 19.9% as direct visits, 13.5% through referrals and only 8.8% through the AI channel. In May 2025, Google acknowledged that links in AI Mode carried noreferrer attributes that stripped referrer data, so visits were logged as unknown or direct, and its John Mueller called it a bug. Analytics vendors have since added categories of their own: Google Analytics introduced an AI Assistant channel for referrals from ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude in May 2026. OneLittleWeb does not describe how its providers identify AI referrals, so part of the AI-influenced traffic may sit inside its direct and search totals.
Wikipedia, Amazon and news lose ground
The industry table shows where visits drained away. OneLittleWeb lists ten of its 29 industries:
| Industry | Visits | Share | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Search Engines | 2.01 trillion | 51.63% | +0.69% |
| Social Media | 456.96 billion | 11.76% | +0.98% |
| News and Media | 206.68 billion | 5.32% | -14.47% |
| E-Commerce | 198.62 billion | 5.11% | -12.00% |
| Software | 185.59 billion | 4.78% | -3.21% |
| AI Tool | 159.57 billion | 4.11% | +32.14% |
| Communication | 104.51 billion | 2.69% | +0.91% |
| Education and Research | 84.00 billion | 2.16% | -13.12% |
| Entertainment | 80.39 billion | 2.07% | -10.84% |
| Video Streaming | 66.24 billion | 1.70% | +1.64% |
Wikipedia fell 14.81% to 51.12 billion visits, the second-largest loss in absolute terms. The site has long leaned on Google: in 2024, PPC Land reported Kevin Indig's estimate that 84% of Wikipedia's traffic came from Google organic search. OneLittleWeb does not break down Wikipedia's own traffic sources, so the dashboard cannot say which channel accounts for the drop.
News and Media lost 14.47%, the steepest decline among the ten industries shown. That matches the direction of publisher analytics data: Chartbeat data showed small publishers lost 60% of their search referrals over two years, medium-sized publishers 47% and large publishers 22%. Education and Research fell 13.12% and Entertainment 10.84%.
Shopping looks weaker too, with a caveat. Amazon's website traffic fell 15.79% to 28.97 billion visits, and E-Commerce as a whole lost 12.00%. Temu takes 8.3% of E-Commerce visits on OneLittleWeb's numbers, eBay and Walmart 3.2% each. Because app activity is excluded, the figures say nothing about shopping inside Amazon's or Temu's apps. The same applies to Google Play, whose web visits dropped 38%; it accounts for 4.7% of Software visits. Video Streaming, where Netflix holds 24.7% of visits, edged up 1.64%.
The United States holds a quarter of visits
OneLittleWeb's top ten countries by visits:
| Rank | Country | Visits | Share | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | United States | 911.78 billion | 25.13% | +0.40% |
| 2 | Japan | 221.37 billion | 6.10% | -6.81% |
| 3 | India | 202.65 billion | 5.58% | -2.81% |
| 4 | Brazil | 191.42 billion | 5.28% | +1.75% |
| 5 | Germany | 138.25 billion | 3.81% | -4.35% |
| 6 | South Korea | 126.07 billion | 3.47% | -17.60% |
| 7 | United Kingdom | 117.77 billion | 3.25% | -13.63% |
| 8 | Turkey | 105.54 billion | 2.91% | +1.62% |
| 9 | France | 101.27 billion | 2.79% | -9.55% |
| 10 | Italy | 91.61 billion | 2.52% | -2.79% |
Only three of the ten grew - the United States, Brazil and Turkey, each by less than 2%. South Korea and the United Kingdom recorded the sharpest falls, at 17.60% and 13.63%. As noted above, the country shares rest on a base of about 3.63 trillion visits, not the 3.89 trillion used elsewhere on the page.
Why the estimates matter for search marketers
Third-party traffic estimates are one of the few public views of how attention is distributed across the web. OneLittleWeb's own guidance sets the limits: its figures are estimates "so they should be used directionally for ranking, comparison, trend spotting, and market share analysis," according to the methodology section.
Read that way, the dashboard says three things. Google remains the dominant destination on the web, with 31.11% of tracked browser visits and about 87% of visits to search engines once YouTube is set aside. Generative AI services have become major destinations in their own right, with ChatGPT ahead of Reddit, Wikipedia and X. And those services still send very little traffic onward: 0.2% of visits, against 12.4% from search.
The Bing figure is the outlier, and the most consequential for advertisers who buy search inventory beyond Google. A 45.64% drop in estimated visits sits awkwardly beside Microsoft's statement that Bing has gained audience share for five consecutive years and beside desktop panel data that shows a fall from a December peak rather than a year-long slide. Either estimated browser visits to a single domain capture something that revenue and share figures miss, or the estimate overstates the decline. The page does not provide what is needed to tell which: it gives no domain-level detail for Bing, and the dataset's own size changed by nearly 3,000 sites between the April and September versions.
For publishers, the traffic-source table restates a problem already visible in their own analytics. AI tools absorb a growing share of attention, and the referrals they send are small, even allowing for the visits that arrive unlabelled. The dashboard measures the gap without explaining it.
Timeline
- August 2, 2024 - Kevin Indig's analysis puts Google organic search at 84% of Wikipedia's traffic
- May 23, 2025 - Google's John Mueller calls the AI Mode noreferrer issue, which logged visits without referrer data, a bug
- October 2025 - Start of the twelve-month window in OneLittleWeb's current Most Popular Websites dashboard
- November 6, 2025 - Microsoft Clarity reports AI referrals grew 155.6% in eight months but stayed under 1% of traffic across 1,277 publisher domains
- November 19, 2025 - Adobe agrees to acquire Semrush for $1.9 billion in cash
- December 2025 - Cloudflare's 2025 Year in Review puts Google at 89.5% and Bing at 3.1% of search engine referrals
- February 11, 2026 - Ahrefs estimates ChatGPT sends about 190 times less traffic to websites than Google
- March 2, 2026 - SparkToro and Datos put Google at 73.7% and Bing at 4.31% of US desktop searches in Q4 2025
- March 17, 2026 - Chartbeat data published by Axios shows small publishers lost 60% of search referrals over two years
- April 27, 2026 - Datos' Q1 2026 State of Search shows Bing's US desktop share falling from a 5.33% December peak to roughly 3.2% to 3.8%
- May 13, 2026 - Google Analytics adds an AI Assistant channel for referrals from ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude
- May 2026 - The Gemini app passes 900 million monthly active users
- June 11, 2026 - Similarweb puts ChatGPT at 52.7% of generative AI web traffic, Gemini at 27.3% and Claude at 8.9%
- June 2026 - Similarweb finds only 8.8% of AI-influenced visits arrive through the AI channel
- July 29, 2026 - Microsoft reports 10% search advertising growth, and Satya Nadella says Bing and Edge gained audience share for five consecutive years
- September 3, 2026 - PPC Land covers OneLittleWeb's AI tools study; the company's Most Popular Websites dashboard then tracks 10,173 domains and 3.44 trillion visits for the twelve months to April 2026
- September 17, 2026 - Similarweb's pre-IPO primer puts claude.ai at 950 million visits in August 2026, up from 148 million a year earlier
- September 22, 2026 - Comscore reports ChatGPT's US prompt share fell from 70% to 50% between January and June 2026
- September 2026 - End of the current data window. OneLittleWeb's page, labelled "Updated September 2026", reports 3.89 trillion visits across 7,202 websites, Bing down 45.64%, ChatGPT fifth with 70.78 billion visits and AI sources at 0.2% of traffic
Related PPC Land coverage
- Chegg loses 61% of web visits as chatbots gain 90.82% YoY - OneLittleWeb's earlier study of 9,531 AI tools, built on the same Semrush and Ahrefs estimates.
- ChatGPT drops to 52.7% as Claude triples its AI traffic share - Similarweb's June 2026 share of worldwide generative AI website traffic.
- ChatGPT loses 20 points of US AI prompt share to Gemini and Claude - Comscore's Q2 2026 AI Intelligence Report and its panel-based prompt shares.
- Claude gains 540% in visits with 0.46% from paid traffic, Similarweb finds - Similarweb's measurement of claude.ai visits, unique visitors and traffic sources.
- AI still under 2% but growing: Datos Q1 2026 state of search report - desktop clickstream data on Google, Bing and AI tool shares in the US and EU/UK.
- Google holds 73.7% of desktop searches - ChatGPT is smaller than you think - SparkToro and Datos analysis of 41 search and AI platforms in 2025.
- Microsoft search ad growth drops to 10% as Azure tops $100 billion - Microsoft's fiscal fourth-quarter 2026 search advertising results and its statements on Bing audience share.
- AI crawlers now consume 4.2% of web traffic as internet grows 19% in 2025 - Cloudflare's 2025 Year in Review, including search engine referral shares.
- ChatGPT sends 190x less traffic than Google despite 12% search volume - Ahrefs research comparing query volume and referral traffic from ChatGPT and Google.
- Your analytics are lying: Similarweb traces AI recommendations to real traffic - how AI-influenced visits show up as search, direct and referral traffic.
- AI traffic converts at 3x higher rates than traditional channels - Microsoft Clarity's data on AI referral growth and conversion across publisher sites.
- Small publishers lost 60% of search traffic as AI reshapes the web - Chartbeat figures on search referral losses by publisher size.
- Google to fix AI Mode tracking bug affecting referrer data - the 2025 noreferrer issue that logged AI Mode clicks as direct or unknown traffic.
- Google Analytics adds AI assistant channel for ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude - the default channel group change that separates AI assistant referrals.
Summary
Who: OneLittleWeb, a search engine optimization and link building agency with offices in New York and Dhaka, publishes the ranking using traffic estimates from Semrush, Ahrefs and Aitools.xyz. The sites most affected in the data are Google, YouTube, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia and Amazon.
What: A ranking of 7,202 websites by estimated browser visits shows 3.89 trillion visits in total, down 1.06%. Google takes 31.11% and YouTube 16.01%. ChatGPT ranks fifth with 70.78 billion visits, up 35.86%. Bing is the largest decliner, down 20.13 billion visits or 45.64%. AI sources sent 7.46 billion visits to tracked sites, about 0.2% of the total, against 481.30 billion from search.
When: The data covers October 2025 to September 2026. The page carries no publication date and is labelled "Updated September 2026"; it refreshes monthly.
Where: The dashboard is global, covering visits from 222 countries in its country table, led by the United States with 911.78 billion visits.
Why: Public traffic estimates shape how marketers, publishers and investors judge search engines and AI services. OneLittleWeb's figures show AI tools becoming large destinations while sending little traffic onward, and they put Bing's visits on a path that conflicts with Microsoft's own statements and with other panel data, a gap the page does not explain.
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