DuckDuckGo installs rose 30% as users refused to be “forced” to search by Google’s AI

Last week, after Google announced its massive search overhaul, I heard a woman on the phone say she was switching to DuckDuckGo because you could “opt out of using AI.”

“Google isn’t Google anymore,” she said. Others seem to have the same idea.

At its annual I/O developer conference, the company said that its traditional list of blue links will be replaced by an AI agent that answers queries, executes tasks, and manages background monitoring agents.

The backlash was severe.

Some have argued that this will kill the open web, while others have expressed concerns that AI overviews show inaccurate responses and take away control from users who may not want to use AI. It also complicates simple matters. Just try searching the word “ignore” in Google.

In response to Google’s changes, many began defecting to DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused alternative that has never been able to break Google’s dominance, accounting for only about 2% of the US search market.

During Google’s search antitrust trial in 2023, DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg testified that Google’s exclusive default search contracts hurt its ability to present itself as the default option over other browsers.

“Google is force-feeding its AI with no way to opt out,” Weinberg said Tuesday in a statement, referring to Google’s search overhaul. “As a result, their outcomes get worse, not better. We want to be the place that puts users in charge and lets them decide how much or how much AI they want.”

Now it looks like DuckDuckGo is starting to capitalize on consumers’ escape from AI.

DuckDuckGo said US app installs rose 18.1% weekly on average during May 20-25, compared to May 13-18. The growth continued for six consecutive days and peaked at 30.5% on May 25, the company said. On iOS, the install rate is even higher, with week-on-week growth averaging 33%, peaking at 69.9%.

The search engine also said that traffic to WoW’s AI-free search page, noai.duckduckgo.com, averaged 22.7% growth, peaking at 27.7% on May 24. The page turns off all AI features, such as AI-powered answers and AI-generated images, by default.

The company said the trend was stronger in the United States, and that DuckDuckGo continued to attract users over Memorial Day weekend, when it typically sees a drop in traffic.

DuckDuckGo offers its own AI product called Duck.ai. It’s free and doesn’t require users to create an account but provides access to models, including 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 strips a user’s IP address before requests reach the form providers, deletes conversations within 30 days, and blocks chats from being used for training.

“We respect not only user choice, but user privacy as well,” Weinberg said. “Everything you do on DuckDuckGo is private; we don’t collect your search or chat histories and nothing is used for AI training.”

DuckDuckGo also offers a search assistant, which is similar to Google’s AI overviews, and an AI image filter that filters AI-generated images from search results.

Both of these AI features are among the company’s most popular, though their ethos is different, said Camille Bazbaz, DuckDuckGo’s chief communications and policy officer.

“People just want choice,” Bazbaz said.

TechCrunch has reached out to Google for comment.