Google's recent significant overhaul of its Search platform, announced at its annual I/O developer conference, has sparked considerable user backlash. The company is replacing its traditional list of blue links with an AI agent designed to answer queries, execute tasks, and run background monitoring agents. However, this aggressive integration of AI has led many users to feel "force-fed" AI with no option to opt out.
Critics argue that Google's new AI overviews could harm the open web, frequently surface inaccurate responses, and strip users of control, especially those who prefer not to engage with AI-powered features. The shift has also been accused of overcomplicating straightforward search tasks.
In response to these changes, privacy-focused search alternative DuckDuckGo, which historically holds around 2% of the U.S. search market, has seen a notable surge in user adoption. DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg stated that Google's "force-feeding AI with no way to opt out" is degrading their search results. He emphasized that DuckDuckGo aims to put users in charge, allowing them to decide how much or how little AI they want in their search experience.
Data from DuckDuckGo indicates a significant increase in its U.S. app installs, averaging 18.1% week-over-week during May 20-25 compared to May 13-18. This growth was sustained for six consecutive days, peaking at 30.5% on May 25. On iOS, the installation rate was even higher, with week-over-week growth hitting a 33% average and a peak of 69.9%.
Furthermore, visits to noai.duckduckgo.com, DuckDuckGo's dedicated AI-free search page which disables all AI features like AI-assisted answers and AI-generated images by default, saw an average 22.7% week-over-week growth, peaking at 27.7% on May 24. The company noted that this trend is particularly strong in the U.S., and DuckDuckGo continued to gain users over the Memorial Day weekend, a period typically associated with a dip in traffic.
DuckDuckGo also offers its own AI product, Duck.ai. This free service requires no account and provides access to advanced models, including Anthropic's Claude 4.5 Haiku, Meta's Llama 4 Scout, Mistral's Small 3 24B, and OpenAI's GPT-5 mini. Privacy is a core feature of Duck.ai: user IP addresses are stripped before requests reach model providers, conversations are deleted within 30 days, and chat data is explicitly prevented from being used for AI training. Weinberg reiterated, "We not only respect user choice, but also user privacy. Everything you do in DuckDuckGo is private; we don’t collect search histories or chats and nothing is used for AI training."
