If you look only at raw referral traffic, search is close to a one horse race. Google sends nearly 90 percent of it, with Bing on under 4 percent and Yandex, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo splitting what remains. On those numbers alone you might conclude that Google is the only search engine worth a moment of your attention. That conclusion would be a mistake, and the reason is AI.
Bing punches far above its referral weight
Bing's direct referral share is small, but it feeds systems that are anything but. Microsoft Copilot is built on it, and several assistants lean on Bing's index to ground their answers in current web results. So a page that Bing can read and understand well is a page that flows into the AI answers those tools generate, reaching an audience far larger than Bing's own traffic figure would suggest. Optimising only for Google can leave you invisible to the exact assistant surfaces that are growing fastest.
This is why the AI assistant leaderboard and the search referral map have to be read together. Who sends visitors today and who shapes answers tomorrow are not the same list, as we set out in the AI assistant leaderboard for 2026.
What this means for your business
Keep Google at the centre of your search work, because that is where the traffic is. But make sure your pages are clean, crawlable and well structured for Bing too, since that is a quiet back door into the AI answers people increasingly rely on. The good news is that the same fundamentals serve both, so this is about not blocking Bing and not neglecting it, rather than running a second programme. Where those assistant answers actually start is covered in search still starts most journeys.