Japanese Search Engine Market Share in 2026: Google, Bing, Yahoo! and Our B2B Data
If you look up Japan's search engine market share now, StatCounter says Bing has passed Google on desktop. In September 2026, Bing had 52.1% of desktop search referrals in Japan and Google had 41.9%.
I run search campaigns in Japan for B2B tech companies, and I look at our clients' GA4 data every week. Honestly, this number did not match what I see. So I checked our data.
In this post, I share the public numbers, what two of our clients' Japanese B2B sites show, and what our paid search accounts tell us about Google, Bing and Yahoo! JAPAN. We wrote the first version of this post in July 2023, so I also compare the same site then and now.
Summary
Let me give you the conclusion first.
- Mobile search in Japan is still Google (85%), then Yahoo! (12%). Bing is under 1% on mobile.
- Bing has grown on desktop, but much less than StatCounter shows. On the two Japanese B2B sites we checked, Bing brought 10% and 18% of organic search visits in Q3 2026.
- For paid search, Bing is worth it. In one B2B security account, Bing cost about half of Google per conversion and about a fifth per sales-qualified lead. The problem is that there is not much search volume.
- Yahoo! JAPAN uses Google's search results, but its ads are on a separate platform. Yahoo! search ads brought us fewer leads, but more senior ones. Yahoo! display ads have not brought us B2B leads.
Search engine share in Japan, 2023 and 2026
| StatCounter, Japan | Bing | Yahoo! | |
|---|---|---|---|
| All devices, Jul 2023 | 75.5% | 10.1% | 13.5% |
| All devices, Sep 2026 | 59.1% | 31.6% | 7.6% |
| Desktop, Jul 2023 | 69.5% | 20.8% | 8.7% |
| Desktop, Sep 2026 | 41.9% | 52.1% | 4.7% |
| Mobile, Jul 2023 | 80.7% | 0.6% | 17.7% |
| Mobile, Sep 2026 | 85.1% | 0.9% | 11.8% |
From 2023 to mid-2025, Bing was around 15 to 20% of desktop search in Japan (with one short spike in mid-2024). Then it went up quickly: 18.5% in September 2025, 40.8% in January 2026, and above Google in April 2026.
On mobile, almost nothing changed, and Google even went up a little. So this change is all on desktop.
Why Bing's desktop share jumped
The jump started in October 2025. That is the same month Windows 10 support ended (14 October 2025).
On a new Windows PC, Edge is the default browser, Bing is the default search engine in Edge, and Copilot is built in. My impression is that in companies where IT manages the PCs, most people keep these defaults. So I think some office searches really did move to Bing.
However, the one concern I have is how StatCounter measures. It does not count searches. It counts page views that come from a search engine, on the websites that use its tracking code. We don't know which Japanese sites those are, and a 2024 analysis on note also questioned how many Japanese sites StatCounter covers. If those sites have more office workers on company PCs, Bing will look bigger than it is for the whole market.
I can't prove this, and nobody outside StatCounter can. So personally, I use StatCounter to see the trend, and I check our own data for the actual size.
What our client sites show
These are two Japanese B2B sites. The numbers are from GA4 and include organic search sessions only (paid clicks are excluded).
- Site A: a Japanese B2B IoT device maker. This is the same site we showed in the 2023 post as "B2B site (IoT device)".
- Site B: a Japanese automotive B2B services company. Its GA4 data starts in September 2025.
| Share of organic search sessions | Bing | Yahoo! | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Site A, Jul 2023 | 68.2% | 13.5% | 18.2% |
| Site A, Q4 2025 | 69.4% | 16.8% | 13.8% |
| Site A, Q3 2026 | 78.5% | 10.0% | 11.4% |
| Site B, Q4 2025 | 70.2% | 13.2% | 16.1% |
| Site B, Q1 2026 | 60.8% | 29.0% | 10.0% |
| Site B, Q3 2026 | 66.3% | 18.4% | 15.2% |
On Site A, Bing went down after Windows 10 support ended. Bing's share of organic search was about 17% in Q4 2025 and 10% in Q3 2026, and Google went from 69% to 78% in the same period. If Bing really had half of desktop search in Japan, I would expect a B2B site like this to show at least part of it. It shows the opposite.
Site B had a Bing spike. Bing was 36% of organic search in January 2026, then came back down to around 20%. Site B only gets a few hundred organic sessions a month, so one month can move a lot.
One more thing we noticed is that visitors from Bing engage more. On both sites, Bing organic sessions had a higher engagement rate than Google's (71% vs. 62% on Site B, 71% vs. 58% on Site A). There are fewer Bing visitors, but more of them actually engage with the pages.
What our paid search accounts show
For paid search, what matters is cost and lead quality.
The data below is from one account, a B2B security vendor. We ran Japanese search campaigns on Google, Bing and Yahoo! JAPAN at the same time, from January to July 2026.
| Compared with Google (= 1.00) | Bing | Yahoo! |
|---|---|---|
| Cost per click | 0.53x | 0.61x |
| Cost per conversion | 0.56x | 1.36x |
| Cost per sales-qualified lead | 0.21x | 0.48x |
| Same account | Bing | Yahoo! | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Share of clicks | 61% | 25% | 13% |
| Leads who are decision-makers | 26% | 22% | 39% |
A few points from this account:
- Bing brought slightly more sales-qualified leads than Google, with about a fifth of Google's spend.
- Brand search was the clearest example. For people searching the vendor's brand name, Bing got as many clicks as Google (46% of brand clicks each), and the cost per click on Bing was about a quarter of Google's. My impression is that IT buyers at large companies use Bing a lot on their work PCs.
- Bing was stable. From January to June, Bing's pipeline was bigger than its spend every month. Google and Yahoo! did this in only two of the six months.
- Yahoo! results go up and down a lot. Most of Yahoo!'s pipeline in the first half came from one deal. But 39% of Yahoo! leads were decision-makers, the highest of the three.
This is only one account, so please don't use these numbers as a benchmark. If you want to move budget, test it in your own account first.
Where we wasted budget on Bing ads
Bing clicks are cheap, but we also wasted budget on Bing in a few ways. This is from another B2B security vendor, where we ran only Microsoft Advertising in Japan from July to September 2026.
We lost budget in five places:
- Not enough search volume
- Unused budget going to audience ads
- Close variants in Japanese
- "Maximize clicks" bidding
- Landing pages without a form
I will explain each one.
Not enough search volume
The account spent only 64% of its planned budget for the quarter. Part of this was a three-week pause, but the main reason was low search volume for niche Japanese security terms. On one product line, our ads were already shown at the top of the page 94% of the time. In late September, after we turned off audience ads, search could only use about 65% of the daily budget. Adding budget does not help when there are no more searches.
Unused budget going to audience ads
When there are not enough searches, Microsoft shows your ads on its audience network, outside the search results. For us, this took 27% of spend and 49% of clicks. The click-through rate there was 0.3 to 0.7% (on search it was 2 to 7%).
What we do now: keep search campaigns for search only. If you want audience ads, make a separate campaign with its own budget and targeting.
Close variants in Japanese
98.6% of impressions came from close-variant matches. For example, our keyword "AIボット" (AI bot) showed ads for searches like "チャットgpt" (ChatGPT), and ChatGPT-type searches used 11% of search spend.
What we do now: exact match for the main keywords, phrase match only with buying words (product, comparison, cost), a negative keyword list, and checking the search terms report every week.
"Maximize clicks" bidding
This bid strategy tends to spend the daily budget on the cheapest placements. We use manual CPC until the account gets about 10 conversions a month.
Landing pages without a form
36% of spend went to product and solution pages without a form, so those clicks could not convert. We now send ads to a report or comparison page with a form.
Yahoo! JAPAN in 2026
Yahoo! JAPAN's organic search results come from Google. Yahoo! JAPAN adopted Google's search engine in 2010, and the results have been the same as Google's since December 2010. So if you rank on Google, you will mostly rank on Yahoo! JAPAN too. You don't need separate SEO for it.
Ads are different. Yahoo! Ads (Yahoo!広告) is a separate platform, with its own account, keywords and bids. To show ads on Yahoo! JAPAN search, you need a Yahoo! Ads account.
Some other updates:
- The company is now LY Corporation, after LINE and Yahoo! JAPAN merged in October 2023.
- Yahoo! search shows AI answers at the top of some results (on the Yahoo! JAPAN app and browser since October 2024, and on PC since August 2025).
- Its share keeps going down. On mobile it went from 17.7% to 11.8%, and on desktop from 8.7% to 4.7% (July 2023 to September 2026).
For B2B, this is how we use Yahoo!:
- Yahoo! search ads: yes, with a small part of the budget. In our data, the clicks are cheaper, the volume is low, and the leads are more senior. Results go up and down, so we judge it over a quarter.
- Yahoo! display ads: we don't recommend them for lead generation. In one quarter, a B2B security vendor's Yahoo! display campaigns had more than 40 million impressions, a 0.047% click-through rate and zero conversions (including view-through conversions).
AI search in Japan
Google launched AI Overviews in Japan in August 2024, and AI Mode in Japanese on 9 September 2025. Yahoo! JAPAN also shows AI answers, as above. And 54.7% of Japanese internet users used a generative AI service in the past year, up from 29.0% the year before (ICT Research & Consulting, February 2026).
But on our clients' B2B sites, AI assistants still send very little traffic. On Site B, chatgpt.com sent 51 sessions in 13 months. That is about 2% of the sessions from Google organic search. Perplexity sent 3.
We also see AI in paid search. The ChatGPT searches I mentioned above were real searches on Bing. My guess is that many people using Edge type "chatgpt" in the address bar to open it, and that becomes a Bing search.
For B2B content, I would do two things now:
- Write pages in Japanese that answer one buyer question, with numbers, comparisons and real use cases. My impression is that AI answers quote this kind of page more, and visitors from desktop search read them.
- Make sure Bing can see your site. Google Search Console only shows Google. Register your site in Bing Webmaster Tools, submit your sitemap and check for crawl errors. Microsoft Copilot uses Bing's index for its answers.
What we recommend
This is where we usually start. After two or three months, we change it based on the account's own data.
| Your situation | Organic search | Paid search split to start |
|---|---|---|
| Enterprise B2B (IT, security, SaaS selling to large companies) | Google first. Register in Bing Webmaster Tools. Check Bing traffic in GA4. | Google : Bing : Yahoo! about 5 : 2 : 1 |
| Mid-market or domestic B2B (manufacturing, services) | Google first. Yahoo! JAPAN comes with it. | Google about 70%, Bing 20%, Yahoo! 10%. Start Bing with brand and main keywords. |
| B2C or mobile-first | Google plus Yahoo! search. Bing only if your buyers use desktop. |
Two things you can check this week:
- In GA4, open Traffic acquisition with "Session source / medium", filter to organic, and look at Google, Bing and Yahoo! by month.
- Don't decide your Bing budget from StatCounter. Use your own GA4 data and a two to three month Bing test with a budget cap.
FAQ
What is the most popular search engine in Japan?
Google. It has 59% of search referrals across all devices and 85% on mobile (StatCounter, September 2026). On desktop, StatCounter now shows Bing ahead, but we don't see Bing at that level in our client data.
Does Yahoo! JAPAN use Google?
For organic results, yes, since 2010. For ads, no. Yahoo! Ads is a separate platform.
Is Bing worth it for B2B in Japan?
For paid search, in most cases yes, with a smaller budget than Google. In our data, Bing cost about half of Google per conversion. Watch out for low search volume and budget going to audience ads.
Do I need separate SEO for Yahoo! JAPAN?
No. Yahoo! JAPAN's organic results come from Google. But do register with Bing Webmaster Tools, because Bing has its own index.
How much traffic does ChatGPT send to Japanese B2B sites?
Not much yet. On one client site, it was about 2% of Google organic traffic over the past year.
About the data
StatCounter Global Stats, Japan, monthly, downloaded 14 October 2026. Client data comes from Edamame Japan accounts. It is anonymized and shown as shares and ratios only. Site A organic data covers 2022 to 2026, and Site B covers September 2025 to October 2026. Bot referrals are excluded. Paid search data covers January to September 2026.
If you want us to look at your GA4 and ad accounts and see where Bing and Yahoo! fit for your buyers in Japan, please contact us for a Japan search review. You can also read more about our search engine marketing in Japan and our guide to B2B lead generation methods in Japan.
