Bing is gaining ground and making billions
When Microsoft shared its earnings from the most recent quarter, the tech giant becoming the world’s second company to reach a $4 trillion market cap was arguably the biggest news. Azure’s $75 billion in annual revenue also drew attention.
But if you scroll down the earnings report, you’ll see that Bing continues to gain traction and makes quite a bit of money. Microsoft’s search and news advertising revenue grew by $1.6 billion over the last year.
If you exclude traffic and acquisition costs, search and news advertising revenue grew 21% year-over-year.
Microsoft CVP Jordi Ribas took to LinkedIn to discuss the growth of the company’s search engine.
“This is now the fourth consecutive year in which Bing and Edge took market share. Below I’m sharing the latest numbers reported publicly by Comscore (US) and StatCounter (Worldwide) for several known search engines since we shipped Bing Chat and Copilot back in 2023,” said Ribas.
As noted by the CVP, Bing’s fate shifted greatly when Microsoft released Bing Chat, which was later rebranded as Copilot.
Does Bing make money?
Bing has been the butt of jokes since it launched. Family Guy took a playful jab at the Bing Maps car, and many mocked the fact that Peter Parker in The Amazing Spider-Man used Bing.
But Microsoft is a business. If a service like Bing performed poorly for long enough, the tech giant would cut it off.
Despite its status as a meme, Bing makes a lot of money. Microsoft CVP and CFO Phil Ockenden explained back in February 2023 that even a small gain in search market share potentially translates to $2 billion in revenue.
“New users, higher engagement, and increased advertising rates will fuel revenue growth. As Amy mentioned earlier, the digital advertising TAM is over half a trillion dollars, and within that, approximately 40% is in search advertising. For every one point of share gain in the search advertising market, it’s a $2 billion revenue opportunity for our advertising business,” said Ockenden (emphasis added).
If that ratio has held up, Microsoft has made several billion dollars from just the sliver of growth shown on charts from StatCounter. Bing held 2.97% of the global search market share in 2023 and is now at 3.96%.
Bing is more successful on desktop. The search engine’s global desktop market share rose from 8.58% to 11.8% between 2023 and 2025, according to StatCounter.
Those gains appear to come largely at the expense of Google, which has lost 5 percentage points in global desktop market share. Even when looking at search engine market share for all devices worldwide, Google dipped from 92.38% in 2023 to 89.71% in 2025.
Is Google getting worse?
Bing Search has improved steadily over the years, and integrating with AI appears to have increased the quality of search results. But when you’re battling a monolith like Google, taking away market share requires more than improving your own product.
Convincing people to switch search engines is complicated. Entire research studies have been performed just to see what it takes to get people to switch to Bing.
Microsoft has controversially used aggressive tactics to promote Bing, but the search engine may get its biggest gains from its rival degrading.
Several factors have affected Google’s market share since 2023, including anti-trust cases that forced Android to offer alternatives. Google has also been mocked for terrible search results during the early days of AI integration.
Last year, Google recommended adding glue to pizza sauce to make sauce tackier. The search engine also suggested eating rocks at one point.
Google’s search results are also full of AI-generated content and Reddit posts that lack context.
Our Senior Editor Jez Corden took a closer look at why Google is losing users to Bing earlier this year.