What are the most used search engines in the world in 2026?

The short answer: Google, by a wide margin. In August 2026 it handled 91.1% of searches worldwide and 89.55% in Belgium according to StatCounter, which makes it the priority for any business website. But one search in ten happens somewhere else: on Bing first (7.11% in Belgium, close to 9% on desktop), on national engines that lead their home market (Yandex in Russia, Baidu in China, Naver in South Korea), and increasingly inside AI assistants that answer without showing a list of results. This article reviews the engines that matter, country by country, explains who feeds whom, what GEO changes for search visibility and how IndexNow tells search engines about your updates. Every figure was checked on 15 September 2026.

The most used search engines in the world

StatCounter measures each engine's share from the visits it sends to the websites that use its analytics tool, several billion page views a month. It is not a census of queries, but it is the most widely followed public measure, and the only one that covers every country with the same method. All platforms combined, August 2026:

Two ways to read this table. First: Google's position rests on mobile, where Android and the default-engine deal on the iPhone give it more than 95% of searches. Second: on desktop, where people work, the gap narrows. Bing takes close to 9% of desktop searches worldwide because it is the default engine of Windows, Edge and Copilot, and a good share of companies never change it.

Who are these six engines?

• Google (Alphabet, 1998): the largest index of the web, the only one that covers every language with the same depth, and the default engine of Android, Chrome and Safari.
• Bing (Microsoft, 2009): the second largest index, and above all the raw material of many other services: Yahoo!, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia and Copilot rely on its results, ChatGPT partly.
• Yahoo!: no longer has an index of its own and shows results supplied by Bing. In Japan, Yahoo! Japan is a separate company that uses Google's index.
• Yandex (Russia, 1997): Russia's national engine, also present in Turkey, Kazakhstan and Russian-speaking countries.
• DuckDuckGo (United States, 2008): the "no tracking" engine, fed by Bing and by its own crawler for part of the results.
• Baidu (China, 2000): the reference engine in mainland China, where Google is not accessible.

Where Google is not number one

The worldwide average hides entire markets where Google is second, or marginal. If you export, or if you serve customers who come from these countries, this is where your visibility is decided. StatCounter figures, August 2026:

What these markets have in common: the local engine has its own index, its own ranking rules and its own tools for site owners (Yandex Webmaster, Baidu Ziyuan, Naver Search Advisor, Seznam Webmaster). A site that ranks well on Google gets no automatic advantage there. Naver, for instance, works like a portal: its results push its own blogs, forums and Q&A ahead of the open web, and a company that wants to exist in South Korea publishes there directly. In China, a site hosted abroad without a local licence loads slowly and ranks poorly, whatever its content.

Japan deserves a word: Bing exceeds 28% of searches there, one of its best shares anywhere, carried by a large base of Windows computers in companies and by the Copilot integration. For a Belgian SME selling to Japan, Bing Webmaster Tools becomes mandatory.

What about Belgium?

The Belgian market looks like the European average, with one particularity: Bing weighs more here than in the neighbouring countries.

Seven searches in a hundred in Belgium go through Bing, and that share rises sharply on desktop, in other words during office hours. These are the searches of purchasing departments, managers, public administrations and large companies whose workstations are locked on Windows and Edge. For a B2B business, ignoring Bing means closing the door on some of its best prospects. In France, Qwant (0.83%) and Ecosia (1.4%) carry a European alternative: their joint venture European Search Perspective has been building its own index since 2025, named Staan, which already feeds part of both engines' French and German results. A small share for now, but one more index you will need to exist in.

For a Belgian business website, the conclusion fits in one sentence: build everything for Google, and check that Bing sees the same thing. A technically sound site is read the same way by both, and that is how we build ours.

Why Google remains the priority, and where it gets harder

Nine searches in ten also means nine potential customers in ten. Google is the only engine whose business profile (the one that appears in Maps and in the local block of the results) brings calls and shop visits on its own: that is the heart of local SEO. It is also the engine that gives you the finest measure of your visibility, through the free Search Console. No serious visibility plan starts anywhere else.

Three developments nevertheless make this dependency more fragile than before.

• Google answers by itself. Its AI Overviews, the generated summaries shown above the results, reach 2.5 billion people a month according to Google (May 2026), and its AI Mode, a conversation in place of the list of links, has passed one billion monthly users. On informational questions, part of the visitors get their answer without clicking on any website.
• Traffic is moving to assistants. Some of the questions people used to type into Google are now asked to ChatGPT, Copilot, Perplexity or Gemini. They show up in no search engine market share, since these tools are not counted as engines, yet they drive buying decisions.
• Google sets its rules alone. Its algorithm updates can wipe out half of a site's traffic in a week. Existing on Bing, in assistants and in independent indexes too means not depending on a single tap.

Who feeds whom: the map of indexes

The point most rankings leave out: there are far fewer indexes than search engines. An index is the copy of the web an engine builds with its crawlers and searches through. Building one costs billions, so most services rent someone else's.

• Google's index: Google, Yahoo! Japan, and the answers of Gemini, AI Overviews and AI Mode.
• Bing's index: Bing, Yahoo!, DuckDuckGo (with its own crawler on top), Ecosia (partly), Copilot, and part of ChatGPT's web results, which combine a deal with Bing and OpenAI's own crawler, OAI-SearchBot.
• Brave's index: Brave Search, which also sells its index to third-party AI assistants.
• Perplexity's index: built by its crawler PerplexityBot for its own answers.
• The European index Staan (Ecosia and Qwant): part of the results in France since August 2025 and in Germany since 2026, around one billion pages.
• National indexes: Yandex, Baidu, Naver, Seznam, each at home.

The practical consequence: being properly indexed by Bing makes you visible on five or six surfaces at once, AI assistants included. And content that Google or Bing cannot find does not exist for ChatGPT or Copilot either. The foundation is the same everywhere: technical SEO.

From SEO to GEO: what generative engines change

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) covers the practices that aim to be picked up and cited in the answers of generative engines: ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, Copilot, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude. The orders of magnitude, checked on 15 September 2026:

• ChatGPT had 900 million weekly users on 27 February 2026, according to OpenAI, up from 400 million a year earlier.
• AI assistants received 9.5 billion visits a month over the period June 2025 to May 2026, up 70% year on year, according to Similarweb. ChatGPT takes about 53% of that, Gemini 27%, Claude 9%.
• The share of ChatGPT conversations (United States) that cite at least one external source rose from 1.6% in June 2025 to 6.8% in May 2026, again according to Similarweb: up to 23% in travel, under 4% in professional services.

On most websites, the traffic sent by these assistants remains small, a few percent at best, far behind classic search. But that traffic arrives with a precise intent: the visitor has already read a summary of your offer and comes to check or to get in touch. It converts better, and it is growing fast.

What GEO does not change: generative engines read the same web as classic engines, often through the same indexes. A slow, badly structured site, or one closed to crawlers, is invisible everywhere. What it changes, in six points:

• The answer first. Models extract short, self-contained passages. A page that answers a precise question in its first two sentences, with enough context to be understood on its own, can be cited. A page that opens with three paragraphs of introduction cannot.
• Dated, sourced facts. A figure with its source and its verification date is worth ten adjectives. That is what assistants pick up, and what sets you apart from mass-produced pages.
• Structured data. Schema.org markup (organisation, article, FAQ, service, reviews) gives machines the facts without ambiguity: who you are, where, what you sell, at what price.
• Questions and answers. An FAQ where every answer fits in two or three sentences that make sense out of context is the format generative engines reuse most.
• An identifiable authority. A named author, real experience of the subject, complete "about" and legal pages: Google's E-E-A-T criteria also help models decide whom to trust.
• Crawlers allowed in. Your site's robots.txt file decides who may read it. Blocking GPTBot (OpenAI's training crawler) is a defensible choice; blocking OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot or ClaudeBot, the search crawlers, means vanishing from the answers. Many sites block them without knowing, through a generic rule or an overzealous firewall.

One last, cheap signal: an llms.txt file at the root of the site, which sums up in plain text what you do and lists your useful pages. No major player has officially committed to reading it, but it has no downside, and our own site publishes one in each language.

IndexNow: telling search engines instead of waiting for them

A classic engine discovers your new pages by coming back to your site at intervals and re-reading your XML sitemap. Between the moment a page goes live and the moment it appears in the results, hours or weeks can pass, depending on how often the crawler visits you. IndexNow reverses the logic: the site tells the engines, at the very moment a page is created, changed or deleted.

The protocol is open and free. It was launched in October 2021 by Microsoft Bing and Yandex, and it works in two steps: the site publishes a small key file at its root, which proves it is the sender, then sends the list of changed addresses to a single entry point. That notification is shared among all participating engines, with no need to repeat it for each one.

The official list of participants, published on indexnow.org and checked on 15 September 2026: Bing, Yandex, Seznam, Naver, Yep, plus the Internet Archive and Amazon, whose Amazonbot crawler joined the protocol in June 2025 for its own services. By extension, Yahoo!, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Copilot and the part of ChatGPT that relies on Bing's index benefit from the same notifications. On the numbers side, Microsoft reported in August 2022 that 7% of new addresses clicked in Bing's results came through IndexNow; by March 2024 that share had reached 17%, for 2.5 billion addresses submitted.

Google does not take part. It announced it was testing the protocol at the end of 2021 and never followed up: for Google, the route remains an up-to-date XML sitemap, a site that is fast to crawl and, when needed, a manual indexing request in Search Console. Google does run a notification service, but it is reserved for job postings and live broadcast events.

Switching it on depends on your tool:

• WordPress: Yoast SEO, Rank Math and All in One SEO include it, and Microsoft publishes a free official plugin.
• Wix, Duda, Shopify: support is built in, nothing to install.
• Cloudflare: the "Crawler Hints" option enables IndexNow in one click for any site that goes through its servers, whatever the tool behind it.
• Custom-built site: a few lines added at publication time are enough. On kernweb.be, every release automatically sends the list of pages from the sitemap to IndexNow: Bing and the other participants are informed without waiting for their next visit.

In practice for your website: the checklist

• Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools opened and verified, the XML sitemap submitted to both. Bing imports your sites from Search Console in one click: ten minutes of work.
• A business profile on Google and on Bing Places, with the same address, the same opening hours and the same photos.
• IndexNow enabled if your tool allows it, without changing anything in your publishing routine.
• Structured data on every page type: organisation, service, article, FAQ.
• A robots.txt file reviewed, letting in the search crawlers of AI assistants unless you decide otherwise.
• Content that answers: a real question as the title, the answer in the first two sentences, dated figures, an FAQ. The same principle as a website that converts, applied to the text.
• A measure: in your analytics tool, a segment on the sources chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, copilot.microsoft.com and gemini.google.com, to know what assistants already bring you.
• In case of a redesign, complete redirects: AI assistants cite precise addresses, and a broken address disappears from their answers just as it does from Google's results. Our method is described in migrating a website without losing its rankings.

The questions we get asked

Should I optimise my website for Bing? Yes, and it costs almost nothing: a site properly built for Google is also built for Bing. Open Bing Webmaster Tools, submit the sitemap and enable IndexNow. Bing accounts for 7.11% of searches in Belgium in August 2026 (StatCounter), more in B2B and on desktop, and its index feeds Yahoo!, DuckDuckGo, Copilot and part of ChatGPT.

Will ChatGPT replace Google? Not within sight. ChatGPT has 900 million weekly users (OpenAI, February 2026); Google handles 91% of worldwide searches and its AI summaries alone reach 2.5 billion people a month. What is changing is the shape of search: Google itself now answers with a generated summary. The useful question for a business is whether its website is readable and citable by both.

Does IndexNow replace the XML sitemap? No. The sitemap remains the reference list of your pages, and the only discovery channel for Google, which does not take part in IndexNow. IndexNow adds an instant signal for Bing, Yandex, Seznam, Naver and the services that rely on them. The two complement each other.

How do I know whether ChatGPT cites my website? Ask it, along with Perplexity and Copilot, the ten questions your customers ask you most, with web search on, and look at the sources displayed. Complete this with your audience analytics: visits coming from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai or copilot.microsoft.com appear there as ordinary referring sites.

Want to know where your website stands, on Google and elsewhere? Tell us about your business: we will have visited your site before replying, Search Console, Bing and AI assistants included.

Further reading

• Technical SEO: definition and essential foundations
• Structured data: what schema.org brings to your website
• How much does a professional website cost in Belgium in 2026?