Most people reciting Bing’s Australian market share are working off a number that’s at least two years old. The figure you’ll see thrown around in marketing presentations is somewhere in the vicinity of 3 to 4 per cent. The actual current figure, according to StatCounter’s most recent data, is 6.07 per cent as of December 2025. That’s not a rounding error. That’s a meaningful difference.
So if you’ve been dismissing Bing as irrelevant based on something you half-remember reading in 2023, this is probably worth your attention.
What is Bing’s search market share in Australia in 2026?
Bing holds approximately 6% of Australian search queries across all devices, based on StatCounter data through late 2025. That puts it well ahead of Yahoo (around 1.4%), DuckDuckGo (around 1%), and everything else that isn’t Google. It is, unambiguously, the second most-used search engine in Australia. The gap between it and first place is enormous, obviously. But second place is still second place.
The 3.8% figure you might have seen elsewhere relates to data from 2023. Bing has been growing steadily since Microsoft integrated Copilot, and the current number reflects that trajectory.
Who actually uses Bing in Australia?
This is where it gets interesting, and where a lot of the surface-level dismissal of Bing misses the point.
Bing is the default search engine on Windows devices and Microsoft Edge. This means its user base isn’t primarily people who went out of their way to choose it. It’s people on work laptops, corporate hardware, older machines running Windows, where nobody has changed the default browser settings. It’s enterprise environments where IT makes these decisions, not individuals. It skews older and is significantly more desktop-heavy than Google’s audience.
On mobile, Bing is largely irrelevant. On a desktop, it’s a different conversation. Globally, Bing commands somewhere around 11 to 12 per cent of desktop searches, compared to well under 1 per cent on mobile. The Australian pattern follows the same logic.
What that means in practice is that you’re looking at a disproportionate audience of professionals, higher-income earners, and people making considered decisions on work computers. That’s not a bad audience to be in front of.
Is Bing worth advertising on for Australian businesses?
For most businesses, no. For some businesses, yes, and those businesses are almost certainly not doing it.
Here’s the practical reality of Microsoft Advertising in Australia. Because most advertisers have ignored it, the auction is less competitive than Google. Less competitive auctions mean lower cost per click. For categories where Google CPCs have become genuinely painful, legal being an obvious one, financial services another, B2B software a third, there’s a real arbitrage opportunity sitting there that most competitors are walking past.
The catch is that the volume isn’t there to replace Google. It’s there to supplement it. If you’re spending serious money on Google and you haven’t looked at what that same budget would do on Microsoft Advertising, you’re probably leaving something on the table.
Does Bing’s Copilot integration change anything?
The short answer is: not yet at scale. The longer answer is that it’s worth watching.
Microsoft’s integration of AI through Copilot has given Bing renewed relevance in discussions about where search is heading. Whether that’s translated into meaningful Australian user behaviour shifts is a murkier question. The data suggests it’s moved the needle on Bing’s overall share, which is part of why we’re now talking about 6% rather than 3.8%. But the kind of dramatic shift that would fundamentally change how we think about the channel hasn’t materialised.
The interesting angle in 2026 is less about Bing specifically and more about what happens to search behaviour as AI-powered tools become more embedded in how people find information. Bing is, through Copilot, positioned in that conversation in a way that most other non-Google alternatives aren’t.
The takeaway
Bing’s Australian market share is higher than most people realise, its audience profile is more valuable than its headline number suggests, and its paid search platform is underutilised by most advertisers. None of that means it should replace your Google strategy. It means it might be worth a second look if you’ve been ruling it out based on outdated data or the assumption that small means irrelevant.
6% of 26 million internet users is still a lot of searches. Whether any of them are looking for what you sell is a question worth actually asking.