Siri's reliance on Google cut in half with iOS 6
Tests with Apple's voice-driven personal assistant, Siri, have found that the service turns to Google for an answer in iOS 6 half as much as it did in iOS 5. — When investment firm Piper Jaffray initially tested Siri in June …
Context & Ripple Effects
Since Siri launched in late 2011, analysts have tracked which search engines sit behind Apple's assistant: early testing showed it was not just Google, with Bing and Yahoo also fielding Siri queries, and Piper Jaffray ran a June benchmark that put hard numbers on how often each engine answered. That same firm had already found Siri was no novelty — its usage was heavy enough to double iPhone data volumes by January 2012, making the routing question a traffic-scale issue rather than a curiosity.
The new finding is directional: in iOS 6, Siri turns to Google for an answer half as often as it did under iOS 5, per Piper Jaffray's retest. For Google, every point of share Siri shifts away is mobile query volume flowing to Bing or Yahoo instead — on the platform where Google most needs to defend its search position, and shortly after it moved to re-enter iOS directly with its own Maps app.
First-order effects
- Google loses roughly half of the Siri-originated answer queries it was receiving from iOS 5 devices, with the displaced volume rerouted to other engines Apple taps behind the assistant.
- Apple reduces its flagship feature's operational dependence on a direct competitor, gaining freedom to weight Siri's backend toward any engine without a headline-grabbing deal change.
Second-order effects
- Bing and Yahoo gain a growing slice of high-intent mobile queries they could not otherwise reach at scale on iPhones, strengthening their case as credible backend suppliers.
- Google faces added pressure to make its own first-party assistant path — the one benchmarked against Siri in the 2011 head-to-head with Google Voice Actions — compelling enough that users bypass Apple's routing entirely.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds across iOS releases, the default search relationship stops being a user choice or even an explicit licensing deal and becomes an algorithmic allocation controlled by the device maker — a structural shift in who owns mobile search distribution.
- Search economics would then price off assistant placement rather than browser defaults, giving platform owners like Apple recurring leverage over engines competing to be routed queries.
The trend: Voice assistants are becoming a routing layer through which device makers allocate search traffic among engines, steadily eroding any single engine's default position on rival platforms.