Meta platforms dominate in messaging and social media, while Google is still the search engine of choice.
British people spend hours online every day – and half that time is on platforms owned by two tech giants, according to the country’s internet regulator.
The regulator, Ofcom, crunched a mix of survey data from over 10,000 adults and various other digital surveys to identify where British people spend time online.
Alphabet, the parent company of Google and YouTube, and Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, accounted for half the total time that British people spent online, the report showed.
The average British citizen spent 4.5 hours online per day, with 2 hours and 18 minutes, or 51 per cent, spent on a platform owned by either Meta or Google, the report found.
Of the UK citizens surveyed, 99 per cent used at least one Google platform and 97 per cent used one of Meta’s platforms over a one-month period, the report found. This was consistent across all age groups.
The most popular platforms were YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram.
On average, British people watched at least 51 minutes of YouTube per day, up from 47 minutes in 2024, while they used Facebook – including its Messenger app – and Instagram for a daily average of 43 minutes and 20 minutes, respectively.
The study noted that time spent watching YouTube on a television – rather than a laptop or smartphone – was not included in the analysis.
Meanwhile, Meta dominates the UK’s messaging market. This year, 90 per cent of online adults in the UK used WhatsApp, while 58 per cent used Facebook Messenger.
That translates to 44.2 million WhatsApp users and 28.3 million Messenger users. Google Messages trailed as the third-most used messaging app, with 20.4 million adults using it in May 2025.
When it comes to search, Google is still the country’s favourite search browser with UK users logging three billion web searches through Chrome in one month, the study found.
However, it noted that the use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools is on the rise for search, with OpenAI’s ChatGPT logging 252 million visits in August alone.
Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, and Perplexity AI also saw upticks in users year-over-year – but the report suggests they still remain far below traditional Google search.
Overall, Amazon, Microsoft, and the BBC were the most used online services in the UK, apart from Meta and Alphabet products, the report found.
