Last week, after Google announced its massive search overhaul, I heard a woman on the phone say she was switching to DuckDuckGo because you can “opt out of using AI.”
“Google isn’t Google anymore,” he said. It seems others had the same idea.
At I/O, Google’s annual developer conference, the company said the traditional list of blue links is being replaced by an AI agent that answers queries, performs tasks and runs background monitoring agents.
The reaction was strong.
Some have argued that it will kill the open webwhile others shared their concerns about AI overviews superficially inaccurate answers and remove control from users who may not want to use AI. It also overcomplicates simple things. Just try googling the word “overlook”.
In response to Google’s changes, many began flocking to DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused alternative that never quite managed to break out of Google’s dominance, accounting for only about 2% of US search market.
During Google antitrust search test in 2023, DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg testified that Google’s exclusive default search contracts hurt its ability to appear as the default in other browsers.
“Google is force-feeding AI with no way to opt out,” Weinberg said Tuesday in a statement, referring to the overhaul of Google Search. “As a result, their results get worse, not better. We want to be the place that puts users in charge and lets them decide how much or how little AI they want.”
Now it looks like DuckDuckGo is starting to benefit as consumers move away from AI.
DuckDuckGo said app installs in the US increased 18.1% week-over-week on average during the May 20-May 25 period, compared to May 13-May 18. The company said growth was sustained for six consecutive days and peaked at 30.5% on May 25. 69.9%.
The search engine also said visits to the search page without AI, noai.duckduckgo.comsaw an average WoW growth of 22.7%, peaking at 27.7% on May 24th. The page disables all artificial intelligence features, such as AI-assisted answers and AI-generated images, by default.
The company said the trend is strongest in the US and that DuckDuckGo continued to gain users over the Memorial Day weekend, when it typically sees a drop in traffic.
DuckDuckGo offers its own AI product called Duck. It’s free and doesn’t require users to create an account, but it does provide access to modelsincluding Anthropic’s Claude 4.5 Haiku, Meta’s Llama 4 Scout, Mistral’s Small 3 24B and OpenAI’s GPT-5 mini. All chats are private because DuckDuckGo removes the user’s IP address before requests reach model providers, deletes chats within 30 days, and prevents chats from being used for training.
“Not only do we respect user choices, we also respect user privacy,” Weinberg said. “Everything you do on DuckDuckGo is private, we don’t collect search history or conversations, and nothing is used to train artificial intelligence.”
DuckDuckGo also offers Search Assist, which is similar to Google’s AI Reviews, and an AI Image Filter that filters out AI-generated images from search results.
Kamyl Bazbaz, DuckDuckGo’s head of communications and policy, said both of these AI features are among the company’s most popular, despite their different ethos.
“People just want an option,” Bazbaz said.
TechCrunch has reached out to Google for comment.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This does not affect our editorial independence.
