DuckDuckGo recorded a short-term rise in use of its AI-free search page and mobile application as the company promoted user choice in contrast with Google’s increasingly AI-centered search experience. The gains were notable over several days but did not materially challenge Google’s dominant share of the United States market.
From May 20 through May 25, visits to noai.duckduckgo.com increased by an average of 22.7% from the preceding week, according to figures cited in the supplied report. The daily increase reached 27.7% on May 24. The dedicated page offers search without artificial-intelligence features.
US installations of DuckDuckGo’s mobile app rose an average of 18.1% week over week. TechCrunch data referenced by the report tracked six days of growth and placed the peak at 30.5% on May 25. On iOS specifically, average growth reached 33%, with a one-day high of 69.9%.
The increases followed comments by Google chief executive Sundar Pichai that people loved the company’s Search AI Mode. DuckDuckGo chief executive Gabriel Weinberg criticized Google for making AI difficult to avoid and argued that users should decide how much automation they encounter. Chief communications officer Kamyl Bazbaz said both DuckDuckGo’s own AI summaries and controls that filter AI-generated images were popular, interpreting the pattern as demand for choice.
DuckDuckGo was not rejecting AI products altogether. Its duck.ai service allowed private conversations with several language models, with GPT-5 mini as one option and Claude Haiku 4.5 as another. The company’s distinction was between offering such tools and requiring them in the standard search experience.
Privacy formed another part of that positioning. Weinberg said DuckDuckGo did not collect users’ search or chat histories and did not use their activity for AI training. The supplied evidence reported that statement but did not provide an independent technical audit.
Market data put the traffic burst in perspective. DuckDuckGo accounted for about 2% of US search, while Google held approximately 85% in the preceding month. Google also reported that search revenue grew 19% in the first quarter of 2026, attributing some of that performance to products including AI Mode and AI Overviews.
The observed increases covered less than a week and did not establish a durable migration between search engines. Longer-term usage data would be needed to distinguish a temporary response from a sustained change in habits. They did, however, show measurable interest in an option explicitly presented as AI-free. The figures suggested that search users were not making a single binary choice between artificial intelligence and traditional results: some were using AI tools while also seeking a clear way to turn them off.
