In June 2013, DuckDuckGo indicated that it had seen a significant traffic increase; according to the website's Twitter account, on Monday, June 17, 2013, it had three million daily direct searches. On average during May 2013, it had 1.8 million daily direct searches. Some[64] relate this claim to the exposure of PRISM and to the fact that other programs operated by the National Security Agency (NSA) were leaked by Edward Snowden. Danny Sullivan wrote on Search Engine Land that despite the search engine's growth "it's not grown anywhere near the amount to reflect any substantial or even mildly notable switching by the searching public" for reasons due to privacy, and he concluded "No One Cares About "Private" Search".[65] In response, Caleb Garling of the San Francisco Chronicle argued: "I think this thesis suffers from a few key failures in logic" because a traffic increase had occurred and because there was a lack of widespread awareness of the existence of DuckDuckGo.[66]
Later in September 2013, the search engine hit 4 million searches per day[67][68][69] and in June 2015, it hit 10 million searches per day.[10] In November 2017, DuckDuckGo hit 20 million searches per day.[10]
As of January 2019, DuckDuckGo was receiving more than 34 million direct queries per day, and hit 1 billion searches per month in January 2019.[70][71]
