Google Hits the Billion Monthly Unique Visitors Mark

Roughly one in seven people around the world visit Google monthly. How do we know? Google has just become the first company to break the billion visitor mark for the monthly unique visitor metric, according to comScore.

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June 23, 2011 Categories

comScore Google Hits 1 Billion Unique Visitors

Roughly one in seven people around the world visit Google monthly. How do we know? Google has just become the first company to break the billion visitor mark for the monthly unique visitor (MUV) metric.

Google’s Growth and Billion-User Base

Despite increased competition from Bing, not to mention a number of new search engines (Blekko, DuckDuckGo, etc.), Google’s user base has continued to grow over the last year. Over that time period, the company has seen an 8.4 percent increase.

The growth isn’t the best the company has seen. In fact, it’s lower than the growth rate of direct competitors Microsoft and Yahoo (15 percent and 10.8 percent growth, respectively), and substantially lower than Facebook’s impressive 30 percent growth. But it’s still enough to put Google past the billion monthly user point.

That’s a first in the history of the web. It should be made clear, however, exactly what’s being discussed.

We’re discussing global statistics pulled from comScore. Since comScore doesn’t track the data of every single user (instead using a panel that examines two million users), it’s possible the figures are slightly off – although they’re just as likely to be under-rating Google as they are to be favoring them. Second, and more importantly, we’re not just talking about Google search.

While the search page certainly pulls its share of traffic, the comScore report is looking at all Google sites. That means, among other properties, YouTube, Gmail, and Google Docs visitors are tallied.

Google’s Current Search Share and Competition

Google does remain safely in the lead for the total “unique page views” and the total number of searches conducted, but the other companies in the running are substantially different dependent on which metric you’re examining.

In unique monthly page views, Microsoft properties come in second, Facebook properties comes in third, Yahoo peroperties comes in fourth, and Wikipedia properties come in fifth.

For search share alone, Google is in first (11.2 billion searches), Yahoo ranked second (2.7 billion searches), Microsoft ranked third (2.4 billion searches), Ask ranked fourth (502 million searches),and AOL ranked fifth (254 million searches). All the listed figures include searches on all search properties owned by the company.

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