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Sundar Pichai said last week that people love AI Mode. The numbers from DuckDuckGo suggest a sizable minority disagrees. Between May 20 and May 25, visits to DuckDuckGo’s AI-free search page rose 22.7% on average week over week, peaking at 27.7% on May 24, according to data cited in a Hacker News discussion. Overall visits to the privacy-focused search engine jumped nearly 28% in the same stretch, one of the sharpest weekly surges in its history.
These are not users seeking DuckDuckGo’s AI features. They are users seeking a search experience without them. DuckDuckGo offers an AI-free version of its engine, and the spike tracks Google’s rollout of AI Mode, which began expanding broadly in late 2025 and became the default search experience for many users early this year. Instead of a list of blue links, AI Mode serves an AI-generated answer with citations, follow-up suggestions, and conversational refinement — and pushes traditional links down the page.
For a subset of users, that change is unwelcome. Power users complained that AI summaries recycle content from the sites they would have clicked, and that finding a plain link now requires scrolling past a generated answer. An estimated 60% of Google queries now end without a click — a zero-click share that publishers have watched with alarm.
The business case for AI search, however, is intact. Google reported search revenue growth of 19% in the first quarter of 2026, crediting “AI experiences like AI Mode and AI Overviews.” The contradiction — users complaining while revenue climbs — suggests that for most people, AI answers are an improvement, or at least a tolerable trade.
DuckDuckGo is betting the minority grows. The engine, founded by Gabriel Weinberg in 2008, has spent its existence positioning itself as the anti-Google: no tracking, no personalized profiles, no search history sold to advertisers. Its AI products — an opt-in assistant called duck.ai that provides private access to models like GPT-5 mini and Claude Haiku 4.5 — are optional and explicitly do not train on user queries. The contrast is the marketing: Google’s AI learns from your behavior; DuckDuckGo’s forgets it.
The numbers, set against the market, put the surge in perspective. Google still holds about 85% of U.S. search; DuckDuckGo holds about 2%. Even a 28% weekly spike, extrapolated across its roughly 3.5 billion monthly searches, would add on the order of a billion searches a month — a meaningful behavioral signal, but a rounding error in Google’s traffic.
The surge also revives an older pattern. DuckDuckGo’s last comparable jump came in 2018, after the Cambridge Analytica scandal pushed privacy-conscious users to alternatives. That bump faded. The difference this time is that the trigger is structural: not a scandal but a permanent change in how the dominant search engine presents results. Privacy advocates said the incentive to switch will persist as long as AI summaries remain the default.
For Google, the spillover is manageable but not zero. Advertising revenue still depends on queries, and every user who migrates to a no-AI alternative is a user who no longer generates ad impressions. Analysts said Google’s calculus is clear — AI Mode increases engagement and ad surfaces for the majority — but the company is also watching whether regulators, who have scrutinized its search dominance for two decades, cite the exodus as evidence of harm. The U.S. Justice Department’s antitrust case against Google’s search monopoly, and the remedies phase that has followed, make any behavioral signal politically freighted.
DuckDuckGo’s test is whether it can hold the new users. The engine’s pitch — search that just searches — is easy to understand and hard to monetize. Its revenue comes from ads, just like Google’s, though targeted by keyword rather than by person. That model keeps the privacy promise intact but caps how much it can invest in competing with Google’s AI infrastructure. The company has been profitable and independent, and it has declined to chase the AI race at full speed, betting instead that a segment of users wants the old web back.
The pattern is familiar to anyone who watched Google’s first AI experiment in search. When the company rolled out AI Overviews in 2024, the feature produced a string of embarrassing answers — suggestions that users glue pizza or eat rocks — and drew a wave of ridicule that forced Google to scale it back. AI Mode is a more polished version of the same bet, and Google has been careful to frame it as popular, with Pichai’s comments part of a campaign to normalize the shift. What the DuckDuckGo numbers suggest is that the audience for the old web is not vanishing; it is consolidating around the platforms that offer a version of it. Whether that audience is large enough to matter commercially is a question the next several quarters will answer.
The next data point will come from app installs and referral traffic, which publishers said rose alongside the web visits. Whether the surge becomes a lasting shift in search habits, or a spike that fades like 2018’s, depends on how quickly Google tunes AI Mode for users who find it intrusive, and on whether the no-AI segment of the market is a niche or a constituency. For now, the votes are being cast one query at a time, and the ballots are showing up in DuckDuckGo’s logs.
