Search Engine Referral Share 2026
Pageview-weighted referral share for classic search engines — Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, Yandex, Baidu and others — across the BYOViral public analytics network. Refreshed daily. AI answer engines are tracked separately at the per-site level.
Search engine referral share — 2026-09-10 to 2026-10-09
How these figures are built
Period: April 18, 2026 to October 8, 2026. Based on 18,827,609 pageviews from 62 public websites that use BYOViral; private sites are never included. These sites are not a random sample of the web, so read the shares as a picture of this network rather than of the whole internet.
Visits from hosting and cloud networks (identified by network owner, using DB-IP ASN data) and known crawlers are labeled as bots and left out. Last updated: October 8, 2026.
| # | Search engine | Pageviews | Share | % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 168,600 | 74.61% | ||
| 2 | Bing | 27,331 | 12.09% | |
| 3 | DuckDuckGo | 15,482 | 6.85% | |
| 4 | Yahoo | 8,340 | 3.69% | |
| 5 | Brave | 2,327 | 1.03% | |
| 6 | Ecosia | 2,208 | 0.98% | |
| 7 | Qwant | 746 | 0.33% | |
| 8 | Yandex | 696 | 0.31% | |
| 9 | Startpage | 197 | 0.09% | |
| 10 | Baidu | 43 | 0.02% |
CSV with rank, search engine, pageviews and share. CC BY 4.0 — please link back when citing.
Methodology
Referrer hosts are extracted from incoming pageview tracker beacons and matched against a curated allowlist of classic search engines: Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, Yandex, Baidu, Ecosia, Startpage, Qwant, Brave and AOL. Suffix matching is anchored to known host suffixes to avoid spoofed referrers (e.g. google.com.attacker.com would not match). Pageviews are aggregated network-wide across public, opt-in BYOViral sites only.
AI answer engines (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI Mode and similar) are tracked separately at the per-site level inside each BYOViral dashboard, and are not included in this network-wide search engine dataset. Many AI clients also strip the Referer header, which would under-count AI traffic in any case. See the full methodology and sample-size disclosure for details.