DuckDuckGo announced last month that it exceeded 9 billion searches in 2018. Compare that wit h 4 billion in 2016, and that’s a nice jump in just a few years. But to compare, Google sees over a trillion searches a year globally.
Because privacy has become such an issue lately, this has helped DuckDuckGo’s popularity rise over the last several years. The company says that it’s going to “shatter” its 2018 traffic record this year. No matter how its numbers fair this year, it unfortunately controls less than 1 percent of all US search volume.
US search engine market share (1/19)
It seems that there is a number of SEOs who don’t focus on optimizing for DuckDuckGo, but a local SEO noted that Yelp ranks very well for local queries. In a nutshell, optimizing for Yelp can help locally-focused businesses with visibility and discovery on DuckDuckGo.
Neil Patel wrote four SEO tactics for DuckDuckGo back in 2015. And DuckDuckGo’s Daniel Davis offered this general advice: “Our recommendation is to continue putting users first, focusing on high quality content that they appreciate.”
Interestingly in a 2016 analysis of usage and traffic by SimilarWeb, DuckDuckGo outperformed Bing in terms of bounce rates and user engagement. This analysis suggests that its audience was both more tech-savvy and more privacy-conscious. In two years, this audience could have broadened.
Although SEOs won’t give the privacy-base web browser much attention right now, if it continues to grow like it is, it could, and probably will, change.