When Google rebuilt Search around AI at its I/O 2026 keynote, it framed the change as something users had been waiting for.
The clearest evidence that some of them had not is the roughly 30% spike in DuckDuckGo installs that followed within days.
DuckDuckGo said its U.S. app installs climbed an average of 18.1% week over week between May 20 and May 25, growing for six straight days and peaking at 30.5% on May 25, according to figures the company shared with TechCrunch reporter Rebecca Bellan. On iPhones the jump was sharper, averaging 33% and topping out near 70% at its peak. The app-analytics firm Apptopia, which tracks the data independently, put U.S. daily downloads up about 29% over the same stretch. None of those numbers came from a press release written to flatter Google.
The Numbers, and Why They Are Smaller Than They Look
Start with the honest caveat, because it matters. DuckDuckGo is a small search engine. A 30% install bump on a modest base is still a modest number of people, and it does not dent Google’s grip on the search market in any measurable way. Google still answers the overwhelming majority of the world’s queries, and one week of elevated downloads at a privacy-focused rival does not change that.
The size of the spike is not the interesting part. The timing is. The installs surged in the exact window when Google moved its AI answers from an option to the default, which makes the past two weeks something close to a natural experiment. Change one variable, the default, watch a competitor’s signups move in the opposite direction, and you have learned something about what people actually prefer rather than what they tolerate.
Google spent its keynote celebrating scale. The company said its conversational AI Mode had crossed one billion monthly users and that AI Overviews now reach 2.5 billion people a month, milestones it offered as proof of demand. One reading is that a tech giant replaced the search box with AI agents because that is where users were headed anyway. Here is the problem with the billion-user number: it counts everyone who lands on the AI experience because it is the default, not everyone who chose it. The DuckDuckGo spike and the AI Mode milestone are the same event viewed from two ends. One measures the people swept in. The other measures the people walking out.
What “No Way to Opt Out” Actually Means
DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg put the complaint plainly: “Google is force-feeding AI with no way to opt out. As a result, their results are getting worse, not better.” His pitch for DuckDuckGo is the inverse, a search that “puts users in charge,” with a separate AI-free page at noai.duckduckgo.com that strips out AI answers and AI-generated images by default. Traffic to that page rose an average of 22.7% over the same week. The demand, in other words, is specifically for the off switch, not just for a different logo.
Google disputes the “no way to opt out” framing, and on a technicality it has a point. A user who does not want AI results can still click “More” at the top of the page and select “Web” to get the old list of links. The opt-out exists. It is just three clicks deep, unlabeled as an escape hatch, and reset to AI on the next search.
That gap, between an option that technically exists and one a normal person can find, is the whole story. Defaults are not a neutral starting line. They are the single most powerful lever a platform has over behavior, which is exactly why every designer who has ever run an A/B test knows that burying a setting is functionally the same as deleting it for most people. Calling a buried toggle “user choice” is the kind of argument that only sounds reasonable inside the company making it.
Defaults Are Power, and Google Is Spending It
This is where a consumer-annoyance story becomes an accountability story. Google is not a typical company expressing a typical product preference. It is a search monopoly that a federal court has already found maintained its dominance illegally, with the remedies phase of that case still unresolved. Pushing AI onto a captive search audience, then routing the exit through a hidden menu, is precisely the flavor of self-preferencing that put Google in front of a judge in the first place. The same instinct that makes the AI default sticky is the one regulators have spent years trying to curb.
The shift also lands hard on the open web. AI Overviews answer the query directly on Google’s page, which means the click that used to flow to the publisher who actually did the reporting increasingly never happens. Critics have warned for months that the redesign is bad news for the independent sites that feed the web, the ones whose work the AI summarizes without sending readers their way. A search engine that answers in place rather than pointing outward is a fundamentally different bargain for the ecosystem beneath it, and Google rewrote that bargain on its own terms. For the longer version of how Gemini became the default layer across Google’s products, our coverage of the I/O 2026 keynote lays out the strategy these install numbers are now reacting to.
Regulators Just Moved First
The pressure is no longer only coming from users with new apps on their phones. On June 3, the United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority ordered Google to let publishers opt their content out of AI Overviews and AI Mode while keeping it in traditional search results, a control Google began testing in Search Console almost immediately. The regulator called it a world first and said it hands publishers, news organizations included, a real seat at the table to negotiate over how their work is used.
Worth keeping the two opt-outs straight, because they are not the same fight. Weinberg is talking about the reader who wants to search without AI answers. The CMA is talking about the publisher who does not want a free summary of their reporting served in place of a visit. One is consumer control, the other is who gets paid, and Google had resisted both until the choice was taken out of its hands. The throughline is the same: the company kept the off switch out of reach until someone it could not ignore, a regulator or a few hundred thousand annoyed users, forced it back into view.
The Off Switch Is the Product Now
DuckDuckGo’s counter looks almost quaint in 2026. It runs its own free AI tool, Duck.ai, with access to models from Anthropic, Meta, Mistral, and OpenAI, but it makes you ask for it and promises that nothing you type gets used for training. The bet is that “AI when you want it” beats “AI whether you want it or not,” and for one week in May a measurable group of people agreed with their thumbs.
Whether that holds is the open question. Install spikes fade, habits are sticky, and most of the people who downloaded DuckDuckGo in protest will probably drift back to the search bar baked into their phone. But the lesson for Google should outlast the bump. When the only way to register a preference is to leave, some people leave, and the ones who do are saying something the billion-user slide was built not to hear.