• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, Yesterday

Search remains a meaningful discovery layer for publishers despite AI growth, judging by a quarterly report from Datos: State of Search Q1 2026. 

But while traditional search has remained the largest driver of desktop search activity, it has been flat to slightly declining. 

Google is the dominant force. It commanded a 94.3% share in the U.S. in March, recovering from 92.1% in December 2025. None of the other five top traditional search engines—Baidu, Duckduckgo, Yahoo and Bing—even comes close.  

“DuckDuckGo peaked at 1.83% in December, then declined. Yahoo and Baidu remained consistently minimal shares, with only limited month-to-month variation,” the study states.

In the EU and UK, Google enjoys a 95.5% share. 

Of the U.S. consumers who use Google, 64.55% are seeking information about a topic. Another 18.27% want information about a commercial product or service. And 16.30% are trying to navigate to a particular website.  

Some search metrics improved. For instance, Zero-click fell from 24.5% to 22.4% in the U.S. And organic click-through rose from 42.0% to 44.9%.

In addition, attention still flowed to major platforms after search. The leading post-search destinations included YouTube, Reddit, Amazon, Wikipedia, and ChatGPT.

Now this doesn’t mean publishers are suddenly being overwhelmed with traffic. They will still suffer marked declines stemming from Google’s AI Overviews. 

And artificial intelligence.

AI tools drove 1.65% of desktop events in the U.S. in Q1 2026, and have grown from 0.41% in January 2025 to 0.93% by March 2026. 

“Notably, this pace of growth strengthened following Q3 2025,” suggesting that adoption is persisting beyond seasonal effects,” the study notes. 

Still, it's not huge.

This report is based on user behavior collected by Datos from its social panel of tens of millions of active desktop users. Datos analyzed activity in the USA and Europe from March 2025 to March 2026.