DuckDuckGo drops below 100 million searches per day

DuckDuckGo, the privacy-focused search engine, is now trending at below 100 million searches per day according to its public traffic statistics page. Back in January 2021, DuckDuckGo hit the 100 million searches per day milestone and then a year after that, the search engine broke 1 billion searches.

Declining daily searches. But since April 2022, DuckDuckGo has been reporting less than 100 million searches per day. Here are the trends for 2022:

• January 2022: 106 million searches per day
• February 2022: 105.5 million searches per day
• March 2022: 102.7 million searches per day
• April 2022: 97.7 million searches per day
• May 2022: 96.2 million searches per day
• June 2022 (to-date): 93.8 million searches per day

The daily record of search queries in a single day for DuckDuckGo was 111.7 million searches per day. DuckDuckGo is currently at 115 billion queries since it launched.

Why we care. Is DuckDuckGo no longer growing? Is this a sign that DuckDuckGo is giving up on competing against Google? It is hard to say. I personally feel like I am hearing fewer and fewer commercials for DuckDuckGo on the radio, yes, I listen to the radio on the way to and from work. But there still are DuckDuckGo ads playing, maybe not as many?

About The Author

Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.