Goldman Sachs analyst Rod Hall claims that it costs Google $9 billion each year to remain the default search engine on the iPhone , and that amount is likely to rise soon. Google could pay as much as $12 billion next year if the analyst’s prediction is accurate. “We believe that revenue is charged based on the number of searches that Apple platform users perform from Siri or the Safari browser,” the analyst said.
According to recent estimates, there were 715 million iPhones on the market in 2017, and that number has likely increased significantly since the release of the iPhone X, iPhone 8, and iPhone 8 Plus. However, a rough estimate suggests that Google could be paying around $10 per year for each iPhone user. Of course, there’s absolutely no guarantee that paying that much to be the default search engine will actually convince users to continue using its services.
iPhone users can still change their default search engine in Safari with just a few taps. Go to Settings > Safari > Search Engine and choose one of the other options Apple offers, including Bing or even DuckDuckGo. However, since Google is still struggling to remain the default search engine on iPhones, it continues to be the top choice for users, so we expect the partnership to continue for years to come.
