Google spent last week insisting that users love AI Mode, its new AI-generated answer feature in search. DuckDuckGo spent that week absorbing nearly 28 percent more visits than the week before.
The numbers come from a PC Gamer analysis of Similarweb data. DuckDuckGo, which markets itself as the AI-free search engine, saw its traffic spike in the seven days following Google’s public push for AI Mode. The timing is tight enough to suggest causation, not just correlation.
Google’s argument, repeated by executives in interviews and blog posts, is that AI Mode drives engagement. Users click more, search more, stay longer. The company frames the feature as a natural evolution of search, one that users have embraced. The DuckDuckGo data offers a competing narrative: a segment of users, when confronted with more AI in their search results, simply left.
This is not a mass exodus. A 28 percent spike for DuckDuckGo still represents a fraction of Google’s daily traffic. But it is a signal. It suggests that the audience for non-AI search is real and growing, not a fringe of privacy advocates but a measurable cohort of users who prefer a traditional ten-blue-links interface.
The timing matters. Google is under active antitrust scrutiny in both the US and the EU, where regulators are examining whether the company uses its search monopoly to steer users toward its own AI products. The DuckDuckGo spike gives regulators a concrete data point: when Google pushes AI search, users choose an alternative.
For builders, the lesson is not that AI is bad. It is that user preferences are not monolithic. A significant number of people want search that is fast, predictable, and free of generated summaries. They will vote with their browser bars.
DuckDuckGo’s traffic is still a rounding error next to Google’s. But the trend line is moving in one direction, and it does not point toward AI Mode.