DuckDuckGo Statistics By Market Share, Revenue and Facts (2025)

Introduction

DuckDuckGo Statistics: DuckDuckGo is a search engine and web browser that prioritises user privacy, and it promises not to stalk its users. In 2024, it remained a small but visible alternative to Google and Bing. Because DuckDuckGo stopped publishing comprehensive traffic reports at the end of 2022, many of the 2024 numbers are based on estimates from third-party measurement companies and news articles.

Editor’s Choice

• In 2021, DuckDuckGo averaged 95 million searches per day; by January 2022, it reached over 106 million; and by 2024, it was around 100 million per day.
• The annual searches conducted with DuckDuckGo are estimated at 36 billion in 2024, up from 35.3 billion in 2021.
• The site’s user base is predominantly male (approximately 73%), with most in the 25-34 age group, and a considerable portion earns over $100,000 per annum.
• The DuckDuckGo mobile app has excellent ratings of 4.8 stars on Google Play and 4.9 on the App Store, and it has a strong presence in North America and a good number of monthly downloads.
• Users in the U.S. have very strong concerns about the privacy of their data, with around 70% in favour of more stringent privacy laws and 35% willing to switch to a search engine that does not save their personal data.
• DuckDuckGo is a big supporter of online rights and privacy causes, and in 2022 and 2023 donated $1.1 million each year, while the total donations since 2011 amounted to nearly $6 million.
• Almost 95% of DuckDuckGo’s traffic is comprised of direct visits, indicating a strong user base and deliberate usage.
• DuckDuckGo advertising is much less expensive than Google advertising, with an average CPC of about $0.41 as compared to Google’s $4.93.
• YouTube has become the main traffic source from social media to DuckDuckGo, followed by Facebook, with shares from Twitter, Reddit, and WhatsApp Web being very small.
• The number of workers at DuckDuckGo rose from 45 in 2018 to 200 in 2023, and it remained constant through 2024.
• U.S. market share peaked at 2.42% in 2021 and stabilised around 1.96% in 2024, with stronger performance on desktop (2.14%) than mobile (1.81%).

History of DuckDuckGo

• 2008: DuckDuckGo was founded by Gabriel Weinberg and launched on February 29 in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. It positioned privacy as a core differentiator from inception.
• 2010: A public community site (duck.co) was launched to gather feedback and feature requests. The company more explicitly emphasized privacy as its positioning.
• 2011: The company received outside funding led by Union Square Ventures after an initial self-funded phase.
• 2012: Search volume reached about 1.5 million daily searches by May, reflecting rising interest in private search.
• 2013: GNOME Web made DuckDuckGo the default search engine starting with version 3.10, strengthening distribution on Linux desktops.
• 2014: Apple added DuckDuckGo as a built-in search option in Safari on iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite; the service rolled out a redesigned interface with smarter answers and richer results.
• 2016: Cumulative searches surpassed 10 billion, with 4 billion occurring in 2016 amid heightened public focus on privacy.
• 2017: The service recorded its first 14 million searches in a single day on January 10, indicating continued adoption.
• 2018: DuckDuckGo acquired the Duck.com domain from Google, simplifying access; its mobile privacy browser for Android and iOS had been established as the company expanded beyond search.
• 2021: Email Protection entered beta, offering @duck.com forwarding with tracker removal; App Tracking Protection for Android was introduced in beta to block third-party trackers across apps.
• 2022: The DuckDuckGo desktop browser entered public beta on macOS; Email Protection opened to everyone; Google Chrome added DuckDuckGo as an official search option in the browser’s settings.
• 2023: The Windows desktop browser entered public beta; the company marked its 15-year anniversary.
• 2024: Windows releases progressed beyond beta with regular build updates and distribution via software catalogs, reflecting active desktop development.
• 2025: Average daily searches were reported around 100 million; quarterly product updates added options such as blocking specified sites in search results, and the browser remained available on Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android.

Fun Facts About DuckDuckGo

• DuckDuckGo was founded in 2008 by entrepreneur Gabriel Weinberg in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania and it is still majority owned by him and company team members.
• The company is headquartered in Paoli, Pennsylvania at 20 Paoli Pike and serves users worldwide, except for markets such as China and Indonesia where it is not available.
• The name “DuckDuckGo” was chosen simply because it came into the founder’s mind and is loosely inspired by the children’s game “duck, duck, goose”, without any deeper metaphor behind it.
• DuckDuckGo is built as a privacy first search engine. It states that it does not track search history, does not store personal data and blocks many third party trackers through its browser and extensions.
• The service earns money in a different way from many big rivals. It makes revenue from non tracking search ads based only on the current query, from affiliate links with retailers like Amazon and eBay, and from its Privacy Pro subscription bundle that includes a VPN and other privacy tools.
• DuckDuckGo search results are compiled from more than 400 sources, including Bing, Yahoo BOSS, Wolfram Alpha, Yandex, Wikipedia and its own crawler DuckDuckBot, while it does not use Google results.
• As of 2025, DuckDuckGo handles on average about 98.8 million searches every day, with an all time peak of about 111.7 million searches in a single day on 17 January 2022.
• The search engine has processed an estimated 112 billion queries in total and its daily search volume almost doubled compared with early 2020, showing steady adoption among privacy aware users.
• In the global search engine market, DuckDuckGo held about 0.89% share worldwide between October 2024 and October 2025. This looks small compared with large rivals, but it still represents hundreds of millions of monthly searches.
• DuckDuckGo’s audience is very concentrated. Around 49% of its users are from the United States, about 73.3% are male and almost 50% are under the age of 34, according to third party traffic analysis.
• DuckDuckGo is famous for its “bangs” feature. Users can type commands like !w for Wikipedia or !a for Amazon to search directly on thousands of other sites. There are now over 13,000 of these bang shortcuts supported.
• The search engine has a long standing connection with the privacy community. Tor Browser uses DuckDuckGo as its default search engine because it does not log or share personal information and even offers a special .onion address for users who want end to end anonymity on the Tor network.
• DuckDuckGo has been chosen as a privacy friendly default or option in several major platforms over time, including Safari on iOS and macOS, Firefox, Chrome’s default engine list and Tor Browser, and even as default search in some Linux distributions such as Debian Chromium builds.
• The company runs its own private browser apps and extensions on major platforms. These block ad trackers and many cookies across the web and integrate the DuckDuckGo search engine so that users can keep one privacy brand for both searching and browsing.
• DuckDuckGo has also moved into AI powered search. Its AI generated answers, first launched as DuckAssist in 2023, were expanded in 2025 to pull information from a wider set of web sources, and its anonymous chatbot Duck.ai allows users to chat with various large language models without logging their identity.
• The company marked its 15th anniversary in 2023. In a reflection piece, the founder highlighted that DuckDuckGo started in a basement long before events like the Snowden revelations or the Cambridge Analytica scandal, positioning it as an early challenger to data hungry search models.
• DuckDuckGo is classified as a Series B startup as of 2025 and continues to be an independent company, which is relatively rare among search engines that compete against very large tech groups.

DuckDuckGo Search Engine Market Share By Selected Regions

(Reference: statista.com)

• DuckDuckGo’s share in the global market has been steadily increasing since the middle of 2019 until the beginning of 2025, with the largest increase observed in the U.S.
• The interest in this particular search engine rose drastically around April 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic, and the growth continued in the months before the U.S. elections.
• Following this period, the U.S. market share did not grow much more, remaining slightly below 3% from early 2023 onwards.
• The U.S. market remains dominated by Google; however, falling public trust in big tech has lured more people towards privacy-oriented choices like DuckDuckGo.
• Moreover, in Europe, Ecosia has increased its user base, especially in Germany and France.
• At the onset of the pandemic, some governments were quick to respond, while others struggled.
• Trust in the federal government’s management of the crisis in the U.S. dropped steeply—around 20% —from February 2020 to January 2021.
• Out of all the institutions, the U.S. was the least trusted, even less than the E.U. and only slightly more than the U.N., which was the most trusted.
• As vaccine rollout proceeded, generational differences in attitudes to travel vaccination passports were observed.
• Young Americans aged 18 to 24 were the most sceptical, with only about 41% supporting the idea.

DuckDuckGo Daily Searches

(Reference: backlinko.com)

• The graph demonstrates the variations in the daily search volume of DuckDuckGo through the years.
• At the beginning of 2021, it was approximately 95 million searches each day, and this number slightly decreased to about 92.5 million by the middle of the year.
• The year 2022 started with a bang, as January reported 106 million daily searches, indicating a relatively strong growth in that period.
• However, later the numbers took a downturn again, starting from March, which had around 102.7 million, and further going down to approximately 92.4 million in July.
• An upward trend could be seen thereafter when the daily searches went up to around 94.8 million in September and nearly 97 million in November.
• Eventually, the daily searches are predicted to be around the 100 million mark by 2024, which implies that the usage, for the most part, has remained stable but with some oscillations over the years.

DuckDuckGo Search Queries

(Reference: backlinko.com)

• The yearly numbers show the gradual increase of DuckDuckGo’s yearly search activity over time and the year-on-year comparison as well.
• The year 2024 is anticipated to be the year when the search engine receives around 36 billion searches yearly.
• If we talk about the last year, which had partial official data, the search engine processed nearly 31.21 billion searches from January to mid-November 2022.
• As for comparison, the total searches for the year 2021 were 35.3 billion, which indicates a bit less than 2022 once the year’s projection is done.
• The wider historical table displays the very impressive growth of DuckDuckGo’s daily searches from its inception to now.
• In 2010, it handled about 16 million searches per year. The next year, i.e., 2011, saw a tremendous surge as the figure skyrocketed to almost 100 million, and then it reached a whopping 0.5 billion in 2012.
• The next year, 2013, was a turnaround year when the search engine exceeded a billion, and over the next few years, it kept on doubling and increased even more, with the figures—just under 2 billion in 2014, slightly more than 3 billion in 2015, and finally over 4 billion in 2016.
• The growth was steady at first, when it hit 6 billion and 9 billion, respectively, in 2017 and 2018.
• DuckDuckGo was already a player in 2019 with over 15 billion annual searches, and the number kept on growing until it reached 23.65 billion in 2020.
• The company experienced its largest increase in searches in 2021 by 35.3 billion, which was a substantial uplift.
• The trend continued positively for DuckDuckGo, although not as dramatically, during 2022, and the 2024 estimate brings the total back to about 36 billion searches, indicating strong and generally increasing interest in DuckDuckGo over the long term.

DuckDuckGo Users Age Distribution

(Reference: backlinko.com)

• The data not only reflects the growth of DuckDuckGo’s popularity but also its unique user base that is quite different from those of the bigger search engines.
• The male-to-female ratio is around 73% to 27%, which is significantly different from Google or Bing, where the gender division is more or less equal.
• Consequently, males account for around 60% of DuckDuckGo’s total traffic.
• On the other hand, the age bracket of the users corresponds to the 25 to 34 range the most, with that group constituting slightly above 26% of the desktop users of the site.
• The introduced adult generation, that is 18 to 24-year-olds, is gradually coming over to the site, while senior citizens (those 65+) are less than 9% of the population, which means the search engine has a major appeal on the younger to mid-age spectrum.
• About 60% of the user base belongs to the group earning at least $100,000 a year, which indicates the platform has a relatively high-income user base.
• This group of users is very good for marketers because even though it is hard to track the exact number of users through ads, they are all likely to be the high-income, privacy-conscious demographic, which is the most desirable to advertisers.

DuckDuckGo Mobile App Rating

(Source: loopexdigital.com)

• The data emphasises the high performance of DuckDuckGo in the mobile segment.
• The mobile browser is received really well by the users, it gets a score of 4.8 stars on Google Play and an average of 4.9 stars on the App Store, where it stands at 18th in the Utility category with more than 1.2 million ratings.
• Such encouraging ratings are an indicator that the users who have installed the application, on average, enjoy it a lot.
• DuckDuckGo is the second most popular mobile search application in North America by usage, and it is also being downloaded approximately 6 million times a month.
• March 2024—the app had around 800,000 downloads made globally.
• Despite the revenue of less than $5,000 earned in that month, it still did well in visibility, coming in at 23rd place in the U.S. for downloads in the tool category.
• This implies that the app is still gaining ground and keeps being a favourite, although not entirely relying on monetization for its popularity.

Advantages of DuckDuckGo

• DuckDuckGo attracts a lot of users, and in the U.S, the situation is even more pronounced, where the issue of online privacy is particularly troublesome.
• Consumer research states that almost 70% of American internet users ask for more privacy regulations that would at least allow them to opt out of online tracking with ease.
• Over 60% are very much in favour of Congress legislating a national privacy law that would protect individual data from the misuse of companies, and this support is further magnified when those who “somewhat favour” it are included. Only a very small minority—under 7%—is against such legislation.
• Close to 81% of U.S. consumers think that businesses collecting their data is a risk with no upside. This indicates general discomfort with the current situation in which companies handle personal information.
• Moreover, nearly 35% of survey respondents said they would consider changing their current search engine if a non-tracking option were available.
• The survey results suggest that a significant number of users do not like monitoring activities and would be glad to have a say in how their information is used.
• The scenario is quite favourable for DuckDuckGo, which mainly promotes itself as a search service provider that collects no personal data.

DuckDuckGo Donations

(Reference: backlinko.com)

• The information uncovers how much DuckDuckGo supports internet privacy organizations through its annual donations.
• In 2023, the total amount gifted by the company to 25 different groups was $1.1 million.
• The largest single donations were of $125,000 each made to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), The Markup, and Public Knowledge.
• DuckDuckGo has been donating since 2011, and approximately $5.87 million has been the total contribution for privacy and digital rights efforts throughout these years.
• In the beginning, the amounts were much smaller—for instance, they were just below $2,000 in 2011 and around $11,600 in 2012.
• Gradually, donations went up year after year, first up to $125,000 in 2015 and then $225,000 in 2016. By 2017, the total was already $400,000, and in 2018, it was increased further to $500,000.
• Starting from 2019, DuckDuckGo started the practice of donating more than half a million dollars every year, with $600,000 for 2019 and $750,000 for 2020.
• There was a notable leap in 2021 when donations increased to $1 million and were distributed among 20 organizations.
• The company maintained this pattern in 2022 and 2023 by giving $1.1 million per year, thus being a supporter of more than 20 privacy-related organizations yearly.

DuckDuckGo Advertising and Marketing Statistics

(Source: vpnalert.com)

• The data illustrates the pathways leading to DuckDuckGo and contrasts the platform’s advertising with Google.
• Throughout January 2023, nearly all of the traffic to DuckDuckGo—roughly 95%—consisted of direct visits, indicating users either entered the URL on their own, utilized bookmarks, or accessed the app directly.
• The next largest traffic source was email, which accounted for a mere 1.66% of the total, confirming that DuckDuckGo scarcely depends on external referral channels.
• Running ads on DuckDuckGo is considerably cheaper than on Google. The average click cost on DuckDuckGo is approximately $0.41, whereas it is around $4.93 on Google for the same type of ad.
• This situation allows the marketers to spend as little as one-tenth of Google’s amount for a comparable click on DuckDuckGo, thus making it appealing to advertisers who wish to draw a low-budget exposure from a privacy-conscious audience.
• Users discovering DuckDuckGo through social media is also a factor, but this source accounts for a much smaller portion than direct traffic.
• YouTube is the leading social channel, contributing approximately 61.55% of social visits, while Facebook is second with 17.72%.
• The shares of Twitter and Reddit are equal, with each sending about 5.07% of the total social traffic.
• WhatsApp Web accounts for around 1.45% which leaves the remaining 9.13% to be shared among other smaller platforms.
• Generally, the data reveals that DuckDuckGo’s main audience intentionally comes to the site, and the platform is offering a competitive advertising option that is cost-effective in comparison to the major competitors.

Number of DuckDuckGo Employees

(Reference: backlinko.com)

• The graph clearly indicates the annual growth of the DuckDuckGo team. In March 2018, there were only 45 people working for the firm.
• After a year, the total was already 59 and went up to 83 in 2020. The increase in employees was even faster after that, as it reached 124 in 2021, followed by 172 in 2022.
• Finally, DuckDuckGo had 200 employees in March 2023, and the same count sustained in March 2024.
• The numbers speak of a gradual increase from the year 2018 up to 2023, which was then followed by a stable period in 2024.

DuckDuckGo US Market Share

(Reference: backlinko.com)

• Over the last ten years, DuckDuckGo’s place in the US search market has undergone a remarkable shift, with a gradual increase in the early years, a strong rise around 2019-2021, and a slight decrease in the recent past.
• In the total US search market, its presence was hardly noticeable in 2012 with only 0.02%, but in the next years it grew steadily and even surpassed 1% for the first time in 2019.
• The company continued to expand rapidly, reaching a peak share of 2.42% in 2021.
• Subsequently, its market share declined to 1.93% in 2023 and then gradually plateaued at 1.96% in 2024.
• This trend indicates that the search engine captured market share in full stride amid rising privacy concerns, but was somewhat slowed by rival companies and market changes.
• DuckDuckGo’s performance among US desktop users is somewhat better. The percentage rose from 0.02% in 2012 to 1.1% in 2019, then increased to 2.63% in 2022, the highest level.
• Although the next year it fell to 2.13%, a small recovery happened in 2024 when the figure was 2.14%.
• The data imply that DuckDuckGo has always been a stronger player in desktops than in mobiles, and this could be because desktop users are generally more privacy-conscious or more prone to changing search engines.
• DuckDuckGo’s presence in the US mobile market has witnessed an uninterrupted rise from a mere 0.01% in 2013 to a maximum of 2.29% in 2021.
• The mobile market trend as a whole and on desktops was the same; its share fell after the peak, but it was still quite strong at 1.81% in 2024.
• Holding only 0.46% of the global mobile market, its performance in the US is remarkably much stronger, thereby making it the second largest mobile search engine in the country, though very far behind Google’s mighty 95% but still in front of all the other rivals.
• The overall picture presented by the data is one of constant, albeit somewhat fluctuating progress by DuckDuckGo in a very fierce competition.

Conclusion

DuckDuckGo Statistics: DuckDuckGo’s 2024 numbers indicate that it still occupies a very distinctive and unique spot in the search engine realm where privacy, simplicity, and trust are the defining factors. The number of its daily searches that stay steady, increasing yearly query volume, and robust mobile app ratings are indicators of persistent user interest. Its market share is still quite small in comparison to the large players, yet its committed user base, affluent customers, and solid US presence show its power of influence.

Data privacy concerns are on the rise, along with the decreasing cost of ads and continuous support for digital rights, and so, DuckDuckGo still becomes the preferred option for users who want to have a non-tracking, safer search experience in an increasingly data-driven world.

Maitrayee Dey

Maitrayee Dey has a background in Electrical Engineering and has worked in various technical roles before transitioning to writing. Specializing in technology and Artificial Intelligence, she has served as an Academic Research Analyst and Freelance Writer, particularly focusing on education and healthcare in Australia. Maitrayee's lifelong passions for writing and painting led her to pursue a full-time writing career. She is also the creator of a cooking YouTube channel, where she shares her culinary adventures. At Smartphone Thoughts, Maitrayee brings her expertise in technology to provide in-depth smartphone reviews and app-related statistics, making complex topics easy to understand for all readers.

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