Naver or Google in Korea? On phones it's Naver, on desktops Google

Why the two numbers disagree

They count different things. InternetTrend, the Korean web statistics service that Korean media quote every month, measured Naver at 64.28% and Google at 28.37% for 1 January to 30 June 2026, with Bing at 3.84% and Daum at 2.90% (reported on 12 July 2026). StatCounter counts something narrower: page views that search engines send to websites carrying its tracking code. A search that ends inside Naver's own blog, café or shopping pages never reaches those websites, so it never shows up.

Split StatCounter's July 2026 figures by device and the picture gets clearer:

The last row comes from the Ministry of Science and ICT's 2025 survey of 2,500 adults aged 19 to 69, released on 2 June 2026. It asked people which service they mainly use, not how many searches they make.

For your company: if you sell to consumers who browse on their phones, Naver is where most of them start. If you sell to buyers at office desks, Google sends more visits than the headlines suggest. Most consumer brands entering Korea need both, but not in equal measure and not at the same time.

Korean shoppers often never leave Naver

Naver is a portal first and a search engine second. Type a product into Naver on a phone and the first screen is usually shopping listings, blog reviews and café posts, most of them hosted by Naver. Your website may sit below all of that, or not appear at all.

Survey data backs up how much everyday searching stays there. Opensurvey's AI Search Trend Report for the second half of 2026 (1,000 search users, published in July 2026) found Naver was the first choice for 67.1% of lifestyle information searches and 60.5% of news searches. Generative AI is growing for other jobs: 27.2% for learning something and 36.5% for work or study. The government survey above also found that 53.6% mainly use Coupang for online shopping and 50.7% mainly use Naver Map, so a Korean shopper may search on Naver and buy somewhere else.

Naver keeps building on this. Its second-quarter 2026 results, published on 7 August 2026, show service revenue from Naver Plus Store, membership and delivery up 31.3% year on year, and ads inside its AI Briefing answers launched at the end of July.

For your company: what Koreans read about you on Naver matters more than your homepage design. The searches to check are your brand name plus 후기 (reviews), 가격 (price), 공식 (official) and 직구 (buying direct from abroad). For a category, try the plain Korean phrase a shopper would type, such as 독일 주방용품 추천 (German kitchenware recommendations).

What to set up first, in order

1. Look before you build. Check the Korean search volume for your brand and category. Naver DataLab shows search trends, and the keyword tool inside Naver Search Ad shows monthly PC and mobile volumes once you open an advertiser account, which costs nothing. The PC and mobile split tells you how much of the next step should be mobile-first.
2. One Korean page on your own domain. Write it for the searches you found, not as a translation of your English homepage. Keep it in Google Search Console like the rest of your site and mark it as the Korean version so Google shows it to Korean users.
3. Tell Naver it exists. Google Search Console does nothing for Naver; it has its own webmaster tool. Naver's webmaster guide asks you to register the site in Search Advisor, verify ownership with a meta tag or an HTML file, allow its crawler (Yeti) in robots.txt, and submit a sitemap and RSS feed. Naver says content appears in search within a week of the crawler's visit.
4. Put content where Naver looks. A Naver blog with Korean posts that answer the review, price and how-to searches reaches the part of the results page your website cannot. If you pay Korean creators, their posts must be labelled as ads in Korean, such as #광고.
5. Measure by device. After six to eight weeks, compare sessions from naver and google in your analytics, split by mobile and desktop. Put the next month's effort where the visits and enquiries come from.

Where Google still earns its place

Google is not a rounding error in Korea. It sent 66.45% of desktop search referrals in StatCounter's July 2026 data, and 17.0% of adults in the government survey named it as their main portal. Opensurvey also found that more than half of search users now use ChatGPT or Gemini, and those tools read pages on the open web. A clear Korean page on your own domain serves Google, AI assistants and Naver's web results at once. That is why it comes before any paid campaign.

For your company: keep your Google set-up. Do not start from zero on Naver with a separate microsite on another domain. Build one Korean page that both engines can find, then add the Naver-only channels around it.

Where HB Crossborder fits

Our Korea Entry package covers steps 1 to 4: Korean keyword research with Naver data, a Korean landing page written by native speakers, and a Naver blog and KakaoTalk channel set up and kept running, with monthly reports in English, German or French. It does not cover KC certification, customs or setting up a Korean entity; we refer those to partners. See our services, or send us one URL and get a free visibility check. Within 48 hours you get a PDF showing how your brand appears on Naver today.