StatCounter’s September 2026 search engine figures are out, and if you take them literally, China’s search market just had a nervous breakdown. Baidu’s all-platform share in China fell from 59.1% in August to 46.9% in September — a drop of more than twelve points in a single month — while Yandex apparently picked up 15% of Chinese search referrals, and nearly 22% on mobile. Nobody switched en masse from Baidu to a Russian search engine in September. Which is exactly why this month’s data is worth reading carefully.
All figures below come from StatCounter Global Stats’ monthly series (all platforms unless stated), pulled on 5 October. StatCounter measures search referrals to websites that run its tracking code, not searches performed, and recent months can be revised.
The non-Google scoreboard, September 2026
- Russia — Yandex 70.3%, Google 28.1%. Yandex peaked at 73.0% in April and has settled back to roughly where it started the year (70.5% in January). Google’s 28.1% is its best showing of 2026 in this series. Steady, not dramatic. (source)
- China — Baidu 46.9%, Bing 21.6%, Yandex 15.0%, Haosou 12.2%, Sogou 2.6%, Google 1.5%, Shenma 0.2%. On mobile, Baidu fell from 73.4% to 60.4% month on month while “Yandex” rose from 14.7% to 22.0%. On desktop, Bing leads with 41.2%, Baidu dropped to 28.3% and Haosou jumped from 12.6% to 21.7%. (source)
- South Korea — Google 48.0%, Naver 43.1%. In January the order was reversed: Naver 48.7%, Google 42.9%. On mobile alone Naver still leads at about 59.6%. (source)
- Czech Republic — Google 78.8%, Seznam 15.0%. Seznam has climbed from 12.2% in January, peaking at 15.8% in August. (source)
- Vietnam — Google 92.9%, Cốc Cốc 6.0%. Cốc Cốc bounced from a 2026 low of 3.4% in July to its best month of the year; on desktop the snapshot shows it at about 11%. (source)
- Kazakhstan — Google 68.1%, Yandex 29.7%; Belarus — Google 59.0%, Yandex 38.5%. Outside Russia, Yandex is holding roughly three in ten referrals in Kazakhstan and nearly four in ten in Belarus.
- Worldwide — Google 89.9%, down from 91.3% in July; Bing 5.3%, Yahoo 1.4%, Yandex 1.3%, DuckDuckGo 0.7%, Baidu 0.4%, Naver 0.3%, Cốc Cốc 0.2%, Ecosia 0.2%. (source)
Why the China numbers are not a story about Baidu
China has swung all year in this dataset. Baidu’s all-platform share went 58.1% in January, 44.6% in April, 59.1% in August and 46.9% in September; Haosou has gone from 17.8% to 6.5% and back to 12.2%. Real search habits do not move like that. Panel composition does — which sites carry the tracker, how much traffic arrives via VPNs and overseas routing, how referrers are labelled, and how much bot traffic slips through. A Russian engine “taking” a fifth of Chinese mobile referrals is a strong hint that something in the measurement, not the market, changed.
We have made this point before in our look at why Shenma matters despite tiny panel share: public panels badly measure China’s browser-bundled and app-bound search. Use them for direction over many months, never for a month-on-month headline.
Korea and Czechia: the more useful signals
The Korean figures deserve a different caveat. Naver keeps a huge share of its users inside its own properties — Blog, Cafe, Knowledge iN, Place — so referrals to third-party sites understate Naver’s real usage. That is the same walled-garden dynamic showing up in AI Briefing citations sliding towards Naver-owned pages. Still, eight straight months of Google leading on all platforms is a trend worth watching, not dismissing.
Seznam’s steady rise is the quieter story. Nearly three points of share since January, while Seznam pushes AI features and an independent index, is real progress in a market where most “Google alternatives” are flat. Cốc Cốc’s rebound, meanwhile, fits the seasonal and category swings visible in its own Q2 search trends report.
Our take
Treat StatCounter like a weather forecast: useful for broad seasons, useless for deciding whether to carry an umbrella on a specific Tuesday. For Russia, Kazakhstan, Czechia and Vietnam the series is stable enough to inform budget splits. For China, ignore the monthly noise and rely on your own logs, Baidu’s webmaster data and app-level measurement. For Korea, remember that Naver’s value sits inside Naver, where referral panels cannot see it. And if anyone sends you a slide claiming Yandex is now China’s second-biggest mobile search engine, send them this post.