Just days after Google unveiled a sweeping update to its search engine at its annual I/O developer conference, DuckDuckGo reported a sharp rise in U.S. app installs. Between May 20 and May 25, installs increased by an average of 18% week over week.
On Apple devices, the rise was even more pronounced: weekly install growth reached 33%, and at its peak during the same period approached 70%.
Traffic also increased to DuckDuckGo’s AI-free search page—noai.duckduckgo.com—where answers generated by artificial intelligence are disabled. According to the company, visits to the page grew by an average of 23% week over week and peaked on Sunday at 28%.
The surge of interest in DuckDuckGo followed Google’s announcement of plans to replace the familiar search-results page of blue links with AI-powered tools. Those features are meant to answer users’ questions directly, carry out tasks and run background monitoring for agents.
The overhaul has alarmed some users. They worry that AI summaries may surface inaccurate information while reducing users’ control over how search results are compiled and displayed.
DuckDuckGo chief executive Gabriel Weinberg said the company believes dissatisfied users are already looking for alternatives.
“Google is forcing AI on users with no way to opt out. As a result, their results are getting worse, not better,” Weinberg said, commenting on Google’s changes to search.
The user drift comes amid reports that Google Chrome is installing the 4GB Gemini Nano AI model on users’ devices without explicit permission or notice.
At the same time, DuckDuckGo stresses that it does not position itself as an anti-AI company.
“We want to be a place that gives users control and lets them decide for themselves how much AI they want—whether a lot or a little,” Weinberg said.
The search engine, launched in 2008, also offers its own AI service, duck.ai. It provides access to models from Anthropic, Meta, Mistral AI and OpenAI, while promising private conversations that are not used to train AI models.
DuckDuckGo partly uses search results from Microsoft Bing’s index, as well as its own web crawler and other data sources. For that reason, some users who are moving away from Google also treat the service with caution.