✦The question people ask
Almost every conversation I have with a company entering Korea includes some version of this. Is Naver still the one that matters, or has Google taken over?
People want a percentage. I understand why. A number is easy to put in a slide and easy to budget against.
The problem is that a national percentage tells you very little about your own customers, and acting on it can send you in the wrong direction entirely.
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✦Why a national number will not help you
Market share figures for Korean search move around depending on who measured, what they counted, and when. More importantly, they average across everyone. Your buyers are not everyone.
Here is a concrete example from a conversation I recorded with an in house SEO who works at a Korean law firm. For her site, Naver accounts for roughly eighty percent of traffic and Google about twenty. That is a real number from a real business.
It is also not your number. It is the number for legal services in Korean, searched by Korean consumers, in a category where people habitually start at a portal. If you sell developer tooling, or industrial equipment, or anything where the buyer is comfortable in English, the split will look nothing like that.
So the useful version of the question is not which engine is bigger in Korea. It is which engine do the people who would buy my product use when they have my problem.
✦What decides the split
How consumer facing the category is
The more a purchase looks like everyday consumer research, the more it tends to happen inside Naver, where reviews, blog posts, and community threads are the native content types.
Whether the buyer works in English
Technical, developer, and B2B software audiences in Korea often search in English and land on Google. If your buyer reads documentation in English all day, they are probably not starting at a portal.
Whether good Korean content already exists
For newer or more specialized topics, there may simply not be much Korean material. That is an opening rather than a problem.
Age and habit
Search habits differ by generation here as everywhere. This is real but it is the weakest of the four factors, and it is the one people over weight.
Not sure which engine your buyers use?
This is measurable rather than guessable. Send me your site and target market, and I'll tell you whether I can help.
Send me a note✦How to measure your own
You can get most of the way there without hiring anyone.
- List the queries a buyer would actually type. In Korean, not translated from your English keyword list. This step is where most of the value is and where most people cut corners.
- Run each one in both engines. Use a private window. Look at what comes back and ask whether a page like yours could plausibly sit there.
- Note what fills the Naver results. If the page is mostly Naver's own blog and community content, your website is not the asset that wins that query. If it is a list of websites, it might be.
- Check your existing analytics if you already have Korean traffic. Split by source. Whatever is arriving now is a real signal, even if the volume is small.
✦What to do with the answer
In practice the plan almost never ends up being one engine. It ends up being an order of operations.
If Google is where your buyers are, you can start with work you already understand, and the fundamentals from your other markets mostly transfer. Korean content still has to be genuinely Korean, but the mechanics are familiar. What that work looks like for a brand entering Korea is on the Korean SEO page.
If Naver is where they are, the first job is making sure Naver can see you at all, which is a specific setup task rather than an optimization task. I wrote that up in detail in the Naver guide.
Either way, you will end up doing both eventually. Knowing which one to do first is worth more than knowing a national market share figure.
Sources and notes
- The eighty and twenty figure comes from a conversation with Jiwon Kim, an in house SEO at a Korean law firm, recorded for episode 12 of my podcast in August 2026. It describes her employer's traffic, not the Korean market as a whole.
- Naver Search Advisor, webmaster guide (Korean). Read it
I have deliberately not quoted a national market share number here. The figures in circulation vary by source and measurement method, and none of them would tell you what your own buyers do.
✦Common questions
It depends on the category and the audience, and published national figures vary depending on who measured and how. A more useful question is which engine the people who would buy your product use when they have the problem you solve, which you can measure directly.
Whichever one your buyers actually use. If it is Naver, the first task is registration and crawler access rather than optimization, because many foreign sites are not visible there at all. If it is Google, the fundamentals from your other markets mostly transfer.
Yes, and it should. The two engines want overlapping things: crawlable pages, real text, clear structure, useful content. The differences are in registration, in how much space Naver gives its own services, and in what kind of content tends to win each query.
I help companies grow in search, mostly on Google, in Korea and across borders. Since 2021, the field has taught me to look at content and structure together rather than chasing one technical fix.
