DuckDuckGo said app installs rose sharply after Google unveiled a major overhaul of Search that puts AI answers and conversational features front and center.

The privacy-focused search company said U.S. app installs climbed 18.1% week over week on average during the May 20 to May 25 period, compared with the prior week. Growth held for six straight days and peaked at 30.5% on May 25. On iOS, the increase was even steeper, averaging 33% week over week and reaching as high as 69.9%.

DuckDuckGo also reported more traffic to its AI-free search page, noai.duckduckgo.com, which disables AI-assisted answers and AI-generated images by default. Visits to that page averaged 22.7% week-over-week growth and peaked at 27.7% on May 24. The company said the trend was especially strong in the United States and continued through Memorial Day weekend, a period when it normally sees traffic soften.

The shift follows Google’s announcement at its I/O developer conference that Search would become more conversational, with longer-query support, anticipatory suggestions and AI Overviews that answer questions directly before traditional links appear. Google also introduced a more seamless AI Mode that lets users ask follow-up questions inside the AI-generated results.

The changes have drawn criticism from some users and commentators, who say the new approach can be inaccurate, harder to control and less friendly to the open web. Others have complained that AI-heavy results make simple searches feel more complicated.

DuckDuckGo, which has long positioned itself as a privacy-first alternative to Google, appears to be benefiting from that backlash. The company has historically held only a small share of the U.S. search market, around 2%, but it is now seeing renewed interest from people looking for a way to avoid AI by default.

DuckDuckGo chief executive Gabriel Weinberg said in a statement that Google is forcing AI on users without offering a real opt-out. He argued that this approach is making search results worse, not better, and said DuckDuckGo wants to give users more control over how much AI they use.

Third-party data suggests the bump is not limited to DuckDuckGo’s own measurements. App analytics firm Apptopia said U.S. daily downloads were up 29% on average and global downloads rose 12% over the same period.

DuckDuckGo does offer its own AI product, Duck.ai, but it is designed around privacy. The service is free, does not require an account and gives users access to models from Anthropic, Meta, Mistral and OpenAI. DuckDuckGo says it strips IP addresses before requests are sent to model providers, deletes chats after 30 days and does not allow conversations to be used for training.

The company also offers Search Assist, an AI feature similar to Google’s overviews, and an AI Image Filter that removes AI-generated images from results. Kamyl Bazbaz, DuckDuckGo’s chief communications and policy officer, said those tools are among the company’s most popular features. He said users are not necessarily rejecting AI itself, but want the choice to decide when and how to use it.

Google, meanwhile, pointed to comments from search vice president Elizabeth Reid, who said AI Mode has surpassed one billion monthly users and that queries in the product have more than doubled each quarter since launch.

For now, the numbers suggest that Google’s AI-first search push is creating an opening for rivals that emphasize privacy and user choice.