DuckDuckGo says its US app installs climbed 18.1% week-over-week between May 20 and May 25, with a single-day peak of 30.5% on May 25. The company handed those figures to reporters just days after Google rebuilt Search around AI at its annual I/O conference. The implied story is tidy: users are running for the exits.
The numbers, and who's counting them
Most of the data here comes from DuckDuckGo itself, which is worth holding onto. iOS installs grew faster, a 33% average with a 69.9% spike, and visits to the company's AI-free page rose 22.7% on average, peaking at 27.7% on May 24. App analytics firm Apptopia offered the only outside check, a 29% rise in average daily US downloads and 12% globally, as TechCrunch reported.
Here's the part the percentages bury. DuckDuckGo holds roughly 2% of the US search market. When your base is that small, a thin slice of Google's traffic shows up as a double-digit swing on your side. A 30% jump sounds enormous. It can also mean a rounding error finally tipped your way.
The timing isn't subtle. Google's I/O announcement on May 19 said an AI agent would replace its list of blue links, answering questions and running tasks in the background on its own. DuckDuckGo's spike starts the next day. Cause and effect rarely line up this neatly, which reads as either a genuine backlash or sharp PR instincts.
"Force-feeding AI"
"Google is force-feeding AI with no way to opt out," CEO Gabriel Weinberg said in a Tuesday statement, and the phrase is doing a lot of work. He also said Google's results "are getting worse, not better," which is convenient coming from a rival and, if you've used the new Search, not obviously false.
Weinberg has been circling this argument for years. During Google's 2023 antitrust trial, he told the court that Google's default-search contracts boxed DuckDuckGo out of other browsers. The AI overhaul just handed him a fresher hook.
The awkward part
DuckDuckGo is selling itself as the place to escape AI. It also ships a fair amount of it. The Duck.ai assistant is free and needs no account, and a Search Assist feature looks an awful lot like the Google AI summaries people are supposedly fleeing.
And those features are doing fine. Kamyl Bazbaz, the company's communications chief, said Search Assist and its AI image filter rank among DuckDuckGo's most popular tools. "People just want a choice," Bazbaz said. That's a more honest read on the surge than calling it a clean rejection of AI. What people seem to want is a say in it.
Google, for its part, isn't acting cornered. At I/O, search VP Elizabeth Reid said AI Mode had crossed a billion monthly users in its first year. Set against that, DuckDuckGo's good week is a blip.
So what actually changed
Forget the one chart. Somewhere in the last couple of years, "good search that isn't Google" quietly stopped being an oxymoron. The alternatives finally work. What's unsettled is whether any of them can pay for themselves without leaning on Google's index or the ad model they say they reject.
DuckDuckGo says the US growth held through Memorial Day weekend, when traffic usually dips. Whether it survives June, once the I/O news cycle burns off, is the number actually worth watching.
