Originally published February 2023. Fully rewritten April 2026 to reflect what actually happened in the three years after Microsoft’s AI-powered Bing launch.

In February 2023 I wrote that Microsoft had just dropped a potential giant-killer into search: an AI-powered version of Bing, built on the same tech behind ChatGPT. Three years on, Bing’s market share has barely moved. But search got shaken up anyway, just not in the way anyone expected. This is what actually happened, and what it means for anyone advertising in search today.

Prediction vs reality infographic: Bing's share barely moved from 2.8% to ~5% between Feb 2023 and April 2026, while ChatGPT grew from zero to 900 million weekly users and AI Overviews, Perplexity, SearchGPT, and Atlas browser reshaped search from a new category

What I wrote in February 2023

In early 2023 I published a post about what looked like the most interesting thing to happen to search in a decade.

Microsoft had just launched an AI-powered version of Bing. You’d type a question, get the usual list of blue links down the middle, and a natural-language answer on the side generated by the same technology behind ChatGPT. The Edge browser went further, summarising PDFs and comparing documents on the fly.

The numbers made the stakes clear. Each percentage point of search market share is worth roughly $2 billion in advertising revenue to Microsoft. Bing had been stuck at around 2.8% globally for years. If AI could shift that share even a little, it was a game-changer. Google scrambled to launch Bard. For a few weeks, it really did feel like the giant was being caught sleeping.

I ended that post with a note to advertisers: now might be a good time to revisit your search strategy if you’ve only been planning for Google.

Three years later, it’s worth coming back to see what actually played out.

Bing’s market share barely moved

Bing is now at around 5% globally, up from 2.8% in early 2023. In the US desktop market it’s closer to 10%. A real improvement, but nothing close to the “shake-up” the AI integration was meant to deliver. Google still holds around 90% of global search.

The gap that was $42.6bn vs $3.2bn in quarterly revenue back in 2023 is now around $230bn vs $19.5bn annually. Bing grew, but Google grew faster in absolute terms. Microsoft’s bet that AI would be the wedge to crack open search share didn’t really pay off.

If you’d shifted a large portion of your ad budget to Bing in 2023 on the strength of that prediction, you’d have been disappointed.

But search got shaken up anyway

The part of the 2023 prediction that was right, that AI would disrupt search, turned out to be correct in a way no one really saw coming.

The disruption didn’t come from Bing. It came from an entirely new category of products.

ChatGPT went from roughly 100 million users in early 2023 to 900 million weekly active users by February 2026. OpenAI now processes around 2.5 billion queries a day. People aren’t just chatting with it. They’re using it to answer the kinds of questions they used to type into Google.

Google launched AI Overviews at the top of its results page. Depending on the query, the answer is now summarised for the user before they scroll to any organic result or ad. For some categories of search, the click-through to websites has dropped significantly.

Perplexity, SearchGPT, and AI browsers arrived as purpose-built search alternatives. Perplexity answers questions with citations. OpenAI’s Atlas browser will open a website and summarise it for you rather than letting you read it.

Bard became Gemini in 2024. Bing’s AI features got rebranded to Copilot. The category shifted under everyone’s feet.

If you were paying attention to market share, it looked like not much happened. If you were paying attention to how people actually find information, everything changed.

What this means if you’re advertising in 2026

Three things have shifted that matter for anyone running Google Ads or Bing Ads.

Zero-click searches are up. AI Overviews and ChatGPT answers mean more people get what they need without clicking through to any website. For informational queries, the impression may be there but the click isn’t. Your metrics should reflect that. Impressions don’t buy dinner.

Intent-based queries are still where the money is. Someone searching “emergency plumber Auckland” still wants a phone number, not a summary. Commercial-intent keywords are holding up well. Ads on those queries remain the most reliable lead source for most businesses I work with.

Your brand is being mentioned in AI responses, whether you know it or not. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini cite sources. If your site isn’t being cited, your competitors’ are. We covered this in more detail in how to measure AI search traffic and why ChatGPT isn’t killing Google yet.

The lesson from getting it partly wrong

The 2023 post got the conclusion right (AI was going to shake up search) but pointed at the wrong target. I thought the disruption would come from Microsoft using AI to take share from Google. Instead, it came from OpenAI taking share from search itself.

Being wrong in a specific, useful way beats being vaguely right. The 2023 advice still stands: don’t plan around a single view of the world. You just need to widen the view. Three years ago that meant adding Bing to your thinking. Now it means understanding AI search as a category that sits alongside (and increasingly above) traditional paid search.

If you’re reviewing your search advertising strategy for 2026 and want a second set of eyes on where your budget should sit across paid search, organic, and AI visibility, that’s the conversation we have with clients every week. Let us know if it would be useful.