Google's search dominance continues, capturing 87% market share in Q1 2025

The first quarterly search engine market share report of 2025, released by Cloudflare on April 21, 2025, confirms Google's continued dominance in the global search landscape while highlighting modest gains by privacy-focused alternatives. This extensive analysis provides crucial insights for marketers navigating the evolving search ecosystem and reveals important regional and device-specific trends that could influence digital marketing strategies moving forward.

Cloudflare's Data Insights Team published their Q1 2025 Search Engine Referral Report just six days ago, leveraging the company's unique position to measure statistically significant market share data. According to Cloudflare, approximately 25 million Internet properties rely on their network, which spans more than 200 cities across 100 countries. Their methodology utilizes referer headers captured when users click links from search engines, providing visibility into search behavior across a substantial portion of internet traffic.

"Cloudflare accelerates and protects traffic for large parts of the Internet, with a global network that spans more than 200 cities in over 100 countries," according to the report. "More than 10% of all websites connect through our reverse proxy, including 17% of the Fortune 1000."

The analysis process involves several technical steps to ensure data accuracy. Cloudflare uses an anonymized data sample from their reverse proxy, removes bot traffic identified by their systems, and eliminates sub-resource requests such as JavaScript and fonts by filtering content-type response headers. The user-agent header is parsed using primarily uap-core 7e634c8 combined with proprietary parsing technology.

The report reveals Google maintained its commanding lead with 87.062% global market share in March 2025. This represents a slight adjustment from previous months, though the report doesn't specify the exact change. The next closest competitors trail by substantial margins: Baidu (3.230%), Bing (3.159%), and Yandex (2.954%).

When Google is excluded from the analysis, the competitive landscape appears more balanced. Baidu leads with 24.963%, followed closely by Bing (24.417%) and Yandex (22.834%). Privacy-focused DuckDuckGo holds 8.651% of the non-Google market.

The data includes several smaller search engines fighting for relevance in Google's shadow:

• Yahoo: 0.758% (5.862% excluding Google)
• Naver: 0.495% (3.824% excluding Google)
• Yahoo.co.jp: 0.418% (3.234% excluding Google)
• Brave Search: 0.356% (2.752% excluding Google)
• Cốc Cốc: 0.132% (1.020% excluding Google)

Ecosia, the environmentally-focused search engine, secured 0.094% (0.727% excluding Google), while newer entrants like You.com registered just 0.011% (0.086% excluding Google).

Regional variations reveal market fragmentation

The Cloudflare report provides country-specific data that demonstrates significant regional differences in search engine preferences. Australia offers an interesting case study where Google's dominance is even more pronounced than the global average, capturing 92.231% market share.

In Australia, the competitive landscape differs from global trends, with Bing holding a stronger position at 4.955% (63.778% excluding Google). DuckDuckGo stands at 1.501% (19.319% excluding Google), and Yahoo at 0.751% (9.669% excluding Google). Privacy-focused browsers show modest adoption, with Brave Search at 0.266% (3.430% excluding Google).

Operating system influences search preferences

The Cloudflare analysis segments data by operating system, revealing notable differences in search engine usage patterns across devices. On Android devices globally, Google commands 89.249% market share, slightly higher than its overall average.

The Android ecosystem shows a different competitive landscape when Google is excluded:

• Baidu: 4.592% (42.713% excluding Google)
• Yandex: 3.285% (30.554% excluding Google)
• DuckDuckGo: 0.868% (8.073% excluding Google)
• Bing: 0.515% (4.787% excluding Google)

These figures highlight how mobile search behavior differs from desktop, with alternative engines like Baidu and Yandex performing better on Android relative to other operating systems.

Combined country and OS analysis

The most granular data segment combines country and operating system factors. In Australia on Android devices, Google's position appears nearly unassailable at 96.911% market share. This represents one of the highest concentrations of Google usage identified in the report.

The Australian Android market without Google presents a unique competitive landscape:

• DuckDuckGo: 1.770% (57.290% excluding Google)
• Bing: 0.461% (14.925% excluding Google)
• Brave: 0.426% (13.777% excluding Google)
• Yandex: 0.131% (4.248% excluding Google)

These figures demonstrate how dramatically market dynamics shift when examining specific regional and device segments, with privacy-focused DuckDuckGo performing particularly well in this context when Google is removed from consideration.

Technical limitations and methodological considerations

The Cloudflare report acknowledges several technical assumptions and limitations of their methodology. The analysis assumes consistent behavior across search engines regarding link clicks per search session. It also presumes the traffic Cloudflare processes accurately represents general search engine usage patterns.

One technical factor potentially favoring Google involves Chrome's NoState Prefetch functionality. According to the report, this feature "tries to predict which result a user will click on and prefetch it. These count as searches for Google even if the user doesn't click as predicted." This technical advantage could incrementally inflate Google's metrics compared to competitors lacking similar predictive capabilities.

The report classifies operating systems into specific categories: iOS, Android, Desktop (Windows, MacOSX, Linux, ChromeOS), and Mobile (which includes WebOS, WindowsPhone, Blackberry, SmartTV, Nintendo, Xbox, Playstation, and Kindle alongside Android and iOS). Traffic from unidentifiable operating systems is excluded from the analysis.

Implications for marketing professionals

The continued dominance of Google presents both challenges and opportunities for digital marketers. With 87% of global search traffic flowing through a single platform, marketing teams face pressure to prioritize Google's algorithms and features while balancing efforts across an increasingly fragmented alternative landscape.

The regional variations highlight the importance of market-specific strategies. Companies targeting Australian users, for instance, must recognize Google's even stronger position in that market (92.231%) while understanding the different competitive dynamics among alternative engines.

Operating system segmentation offers additional strategic considerations. Android users interact with a somewhat different search ecosystem than desktop users, with implications for mobile marketing approaches. The combined country-OS data provides even more targeted insights for campaigns with specific geographic and device parameters.

For marketers investigating alternatives to Google, the "excluding Google" metrics offer valuable perspective on the relative strengths of competitors. Baidu, Bing, and Yandex emerge as the clear leaders in this secondary market, collectively accounting for over 70% of non-Google search traffic.

Privacy-focused search engines show modest but meaningful market presence. DuckDuckGo leads this category with 1.119% global share (8.651% excluding Google), suggesting growing consumer interest in privacy-conscious alternatives. This trend appears particularly strong in specific segments, such as Australian Android users, where DuckDuckGo captures 57.290% of non-Google traffic.

The fragmentation among smaller search engines (those below 0.5% market share) creates challenges for marketers attempting to optimize for multiple platforms. The resources required to maintain visibility across numerous minor platforms must be weighed against their collective market impact, which remains limited compared to the dominant players.

Timeline and market outlook

Cloudflare's Q1 2025 report, published on April 21, represents the first quarterly search engine analysis of the year. While the document doesn't specify exact changes from previous quarters, the included charts suggest relatively stable market positions with only minor fluctuations through the January-March 2025 period.

The search landscape timeline based on available information:

• January 2025: First month of quarterly tracking period
• February 2025: Mid-quarter measurement point
• March 2025: Final month of Q1 data collection
• April 21, 2025: Official publication of Q1 2025 Search Engine Referral Report
• April 27, 2025: Current date context for this analysis

The quarterly nature of Cloudflare's reporting suggests the next data update can be expected in July 2025, covering Q2 (April-June) market dynamics. Marketing professionals should continue monitoring these trends to identify emerging patterns or disruptions in search engine market share that could influence strategic planning for late 2025 and beyond.