Google pays 36 percent of Safari search revenue to Apple

Apple receives 36 percent of the revenue Google generates from searches made via the Safari browser. This is what a witness in the antitrust case against the tech giant says. Previously, both Google and Apple objected to revealing details of their agreement.

According to Bloomberg John Schmidtlein, Google’s chief litigator, “visibly cringed” when economic expert Kevin Murphy, testifying on Google’s behalf, mentioned the percentage the tech giants wanted to keep confidential. In an earlier lawsuit this month, Google argued that revealing details of its deal with Apple would “unreasonably” undermine Google’s competitive position.

It is not clear how much advertising revenue Google generates from searches via the Safari browser, but it is likely in the tens of billions of dollars. In 2022, Google generated a total turnover of almost $280 billion. The majority of this comes from advertisements.

It has been known for some time that Google paid billions of dollars to Apple for years to maintain the dominance of its search engine. In 2021, Google would have paid $18 billion to be the default search engine in Safari. At the end of October it was announced that Google asked Apple in 2018 to install the Search app as standard on iOS devices.