I think what people mean by everyone varies a lot, which is why I wanted to draw attention to more specific numbers. For example, in the Datos data cited[1], on desktop 86% were using traditional search engines >10 visits/month vs. only 21% for AI chat tools. That is indeed a very significant percentage, but more than 4x less than search and (at least I) wouldn't say that ~1/5 is "everyone."
That feature (Search Assist) can be turned off in the settings, and we have a noai.duckduckgo.com domain that automatically turns it off along with other AI features. That said, Search Assist just summarizes web content and does not generate its own answers, but the summary is AI generated.
We are significantly more than that at this point, including that we've been working on our own web index for the past two years (see https://insideduckduckgo.substack.com/p/duck-tales-why-duckd...). But on top of that we don't get local results, knowledge graph, answers, sports, anything AI related, and many more essential modules from Bing, all of which collectively makes up a large % of the results at this point, let alone the vastly different UXs.
Well, I'd love to know; as I've said in some other comments, we've changed and improved a lot in the last couple years and so feel free to send me feedback.
[1] https://sparktoro.com/blog/new-research-20-of-americans-use-...