DuckDuckGo reported a pronounced jump in downloads in the days after Google overhauled its search engine around artificial intelligence, an early sign that the shift away from the traditional list of blue links has unsettled at least some users. The privacy-focused company said US app installs grew an average of 18.1% week-over-week between 20 and 25 May, compared with the previous week, with growth sustained for six consecutive days and peaking at 30.5% on 25 May.
The gains were steeper on Apple devices, where DuckDuckGo said week-over-week install growth averaged 33% and peaked near 70%. The independent app-analytics firm Apptopia corroborated the broad trend, reporting a 29% increase in average daily US downloads of the app over the same window and a 12% rise globally, lending outside support to a claim a company has obvious reasons to publicise.
DuckDuckGo tied the surge directly to user frustration with Google's direction. The firm pointed to traffic at noai.duckduckgo.com, a version of its search page that disables AI-assisted answers and AI-generated images by default, where visits grew an average of 22.7% week-over-week and peaked at 27.7% on 24 May — evidence, it argued, that a meaningful slice of searchers actively want the machine-generated layer switched off.
The trigger was Google's I/O developer conference, where the company recast Search around AI agents and expanded the AI-generated summaries that now sit atop many results pages. For Google, the overhaul is a bet that conversational, synthesised answers are the future of the product. For a cohort of users — and for publishers who depend on click-throughs that AI summaries can absorb — it has landed as an unwelcome change to a tool they had used the same way for two decades.
The numbers should be kept in proportion. DuckDuckGo remains a small player against Google's dominant share of the search market, and a week of elevated installs, however striking in percentage terms, does not by itself reshape the competitive landscape. App downloads also tend to spike on news-driven attention and can fade as the headlines do.
Even so, the episode offers an early read on the risk Google runs in remaking its most important product so visibly. The company has calculated that the convenience of AI answers will outweigh the disruption to user habits, but the migration — however modest in absolute terms — is a reminder that a vocal segment of searchers is willing to vote with their downloads when the experience changes beneath them.