Users vote with their feet - and their feet are fleeing Google. DuckDuckGo, the small privacy-focused search engine that spent years trying to break Google's monopoly and didn't succeed, has had an unexpected surge this week. US installs grew 30.5% in a single day, and on certain days iOS growth was nearly 70%.

The reason isn't a mystery. Last week at Google I/O, the developer conference, Google announced a dramatic recomposition of search. The classic list of blue links is being replaced by an AI agent that answers questions, executes tasks and actively follows in the background. The reaction was sharp. Some users say Google is killing the open web with this; others, that AI overviews often give incorrect answers and seize a kind of control the user didn't ask for.

So DuckDuckGo unexpectedly emerges as a safe harbour. CEO Gabriel Weinberg says directly: „Google is feeding users AI with no opt-out. Their results are getting worse, not better. We want to be the place that puts the user in control - they decide how much AI they want or don't want."

The numbers are concrete. Between 20 and 25 May, week-on-week install growth averaged 18.1% (compared with the week before), and the 30.5% peak hit on 25 May. On iOS, the average was 33%, the peak 69.9%. Visits to the special page noai.duckduckgo.com - which turns off all AI features - grew an average of 22.7% per week, peaking at 27.7% on 24 May. And that's specifically in the US; growth continued through the Memorial Day holiday, when traffic usually drops.

It's not that DuckDuckGo doesn't have its own AI. It does. It's called Duck.ai, it's free, and it offers access to Anthropic's Claude 4.5 Haiku, Meta's Llama 4 Scout, Mistral's Small 3 and OpenAI's GPT-5 mini - without creating a profile. All conversations are private (IP is stripped, chats are deleted in 30 days, and nothing is used to train models). There's also Search Assist (similar to Google's AI overviews) and a filter for AI-generated images. The difference is simple: AI exists as an option, not a compulsion.

For Google, a 2% market-share growth is not an existential threat in numbers. But the trend is a symptom. When the verdict in Google's 2023 antitrust case showed that its exclusive default-search contracts hurt competitors, that was on paper then. Now it's showing up in install statistics. „People just want a choice," said DuckDuckGo's spokesperson - and that may be the most recognisable phrase for the user revolt of 2026.