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ToggleDuckDuckGo has held approximately 2% of the US search market share for seven years. In 2023, CEO Gabriel Weinberg even went to Congress to accuse Google of blocking competitors from entering the market through exclusive pre-set search contracts.
However, an ironic turn of events occurred at the end of May this year, and it was Google itself that brought DuckDuckGo back into the public eye.
Last week at Google I/O 2026, it was announced that Search would undergo its biggest interface redesign ever, significantly introducing AI agents. Some commentators believe this will "kill the open web," while users criticize the AI Overviews for frequently giving incorrect responses. The more fundamental concern is that users are losing control over their search experience.
DuckDuckGo bucks the trend and surges 30.5%.
Data released by DuckDuckGo on May 27 showed that the reaction in the US was almost immediate after the Google I/O redesign announcement.
From May 20th to May 25th, compared to the previous week (May 13th to May 18th), DuckDuckGo's US app installations grew by an average of 18.1% weekly, peaking at 30.5% on May 25th alone. The figures for iOS were even more extreme: an average weekly growth of 33%, with a single-day peak of 69.9%.
Another set of figures is also noteworthy: noai.duckduckgo.com , the AI-free search page launched by DuckDuckGo, filters out all AI-generated content and only presents traditional web page index results. During the same period, the average weekly growth in visits was 22.7%, with a peak of 27.7% on May 24.
When these numbers are put together, they describe two different behaviors of the same group of users: some switched to DuckDuckGo because they were dissatisfied with Google, while others who were already using DuckDuckGo started to deliberately choose the entry point that "does not involve AI".
Weinberg's stance: the right to choose, not anti-AI.
In a public statement, CEO Weinberg said, "Google is forcing AI on us with no opt-out option. The result is increasingly poor search quality. We want to be the one where users decide for themselves how much AI they want."
However, it should be noted that DuckDuckGo does not position itself as an "anti-AI company." In fact, Duck.ai is the company's free, registration-free AI chat tool, which currently supports Claude 4.5 Haiku, Llama 4 Scout, Mistral Small 3 24B, and GPT-5 mini, and the list of models is constantly being updated.
The privacy mechanism is designed as follows: the system removes the user's IP address before the request is sent to the model provider; the chat history is deleted within 30 days; and it is not used for model training.
The company's other features, Search Assist (similar to Google AI Overviews, providing AI summaries above search results) and AI Image Filter (a tool for filtering AI-generated images), are currently popular. In the announcement, head Kamyl Bazbaz stated directly, "People just want choice."
This statement completes the core of DuckDuckGo's entire argument: the focus has never been "whether AI should be used," but rather "who holds the power button," which is precisely the part that was removed from Google's new search interface.
The Politics of AI Agent Search: Who Decides What You See?
Google's AI search redesign technically changes the traditional "providing you with links and letting you read them yourself" to "AI organizing the answers for you and even monitoring new information in the background."
From an efficiency perspective, this is a reasonable next step; however, from an information control perspective, it means that there is an additional opaque filter between the user and the original webpage. Whether this will subtly strengthen content censorship is a topic worth discussing.
On the other hand, Google is also rewriting its advertising rules at the same time: embedding AI-native ads directly into the AI search conversation interface and rewriting the keyword bidding logic of the past thirty years with Gemini.
While DuckDuckGo's recent outburst doesn't signify any shift in Google's dominance, it does demonstrate how much effort and percentage of users are willing to expend to find alternatives when a monopolistic platform decides to promote a particular experience.
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