Change the Default Search Engine on iPad

By Bill Hartzer · Updated 17 September 2026

The answer, in one path

Safari's search engine on iPad is an iPadOS setting: open Settings, choose Apps in the left-hand sidebar, tap Safari, then Search Engine, and pick from the list. Nothing inside Safari itself changes it, and no other browser on the iPad obeys it.

What follows was checked against Apple's iPad User Guide in September 2026. That guide is published for iPadOS 27, iPadOS 26 and iPadOS 18, and gives one set of steps across all of them: Settings, Apps, Safari, Search Engine. If your iPad runs iPadOS 17 or older there is no Apps entry — Safari appears in the sidebar directly, roughly two thirds of the way down, and everything after that step is unchanged.

Open Settings. On iPad it opens as two columns: a sidebar of categories on the left, the selected category's controls on the right.
In the sidebar, scroll to the foot of the list and tap Apps. The right-hand pane fills with an alphabetical list of every installed app that exposes settings.
Tap Safari. Faster alternative: tap the Search field at the top of the sidebar and type search engine, which jumps straight to the row.
In the Search group, tap Search Engine.
Tap your choice. The tick moves; there is nothing to confirm and nothing to save.
Swipe up to leave Settings. Every open Safari window — including both halves of a Split View and anything in Slide Over — is already using the new engine.

Apple documents a second, system-level row too: Settings → Search → Search Engine, published as "Change your default search engine on iPad" alongside the Default Apps controls, and noted on the iOS 18 edition of the same page as requiring 18.2 or later. Apple does not state whether that row holds the same value as Safari's own Search Engine row or a separate system default, so the relationship between the two is unconfirmed here.

The menu is fixed, and shorter than you expect

iPadOS presents a closed list rather than a field you can fill in. On an iPad set to a United States region that list is Google, Yahoo, Bing, DuckDuckGo and Ecosia. Apple's guide says only to choose a search engine and does not publish the roster, so those five names are read off the device, not from vendor documentation. Region matters: devices configured for mainland China have been offered Baidu, and Russian-region devices Yandex. Nothing you install can insert an extra row into that menu.

So Kagi, Qwant, Swisscows, Startpage, Brave Search and Marginalia are all unavailable to Safari's address bar in the ordinary sense. The workarounds are worth knowing in order of how little they cost you: use that engine's own iPad app if it has one; install a browser that lists it; or add the engine's search page to the Home Screen and start searches there. On a tablet the third option is less painful than on a phone, because the larger Home Screen makes a saved web app easy to reach.

One iPad-specific wrinkle: apps on iPadOS that embed web content in an in-app browser view generally hand searches to the system, not to your chosen engine, so a link opened inside a social or news app may behave differently from the same query typed into Safari.

Profiles, Split View and Private Browsing

Safari on iPadOS supports profiles — separate compartments for work and personal browsing, each with its own tab groups, favourites, history, cookies and enabled extensions. Profiles do not each carry a search engine. The engine is set once, at the app level, and every profile inherits it, so switching from a Work profile to a Personal one does not switch engines with it.

Private Browsing is the exception. Under Search Engine there is an Also Use in Private Browsing switch. Turn it off and a Private Search Engine row appears, and that is where the engine for private tabs is chosen; Apple sets out exactly that sequence on its iPad Private Browsing page, checked September 2026. The switch dates from iPadOS 17, which Apple's current page does not confirm either way. This is the one place iPadOS lets two engines coexist, and the sensible use of it is to leave everyday browsing on whichever engine you find most useful while sending the searches you would rather not have attached to a profile somewhere else entirely.

Split View does not complicate any of this. Two Safari windows side by side are one app with one setting; there is no way to run Google in the left pane and DuckDuckGo in the right.

School, work and family iPads often will not let you

iPads are managed far more often than iPhones — they are the standard one-to-one device in schools — and a managed iPad can have this setting locked. If Search Engine is greyed out, missing, or snaps back the moment you leave Settings, look at Settings → General → VPN & Device Management, which is where Apple says installed configuration profiles are listed. A configuration profile listed there means an administrator, through Mobile Device Management or Apple School Manager, is setting the value for you. That is working as designed and cannot be overridden from the device; nor can it be fixed by reinstalling a browser, because the restriction is applied to the operating system rather than to an app.

Screen Time is the domestic version of the same thing. Under Screen Time → Content & Privacy Restrictions, web content limits can strip Safari's options down or hide Safari from the Home Screen altogether. If a family organizer set that up, the passcode that unlocks it is theirs, not the device passcode.

Every other browser keeps its own preference

Because iPadOS gives each browser its own storage rather than a shared system value, a change in Safari is invisible to the rest. Each one is set from inside the app:

Chrome: … menu (top right on iPad) → Settings → Search engine. Google notes that engines you have recently searched from are added to the list automatically.
Firefox: menu button — top right on iPad, per Mozilla's documentation — → Settings → Search, then tap the name of the current default engine and choose from the list.
Brave: … menu → Settings, which holds separate defaults for ordinary and private tabs.
Edge: … menu → Settings. Microsoft's mobile FAQ carries two labels across its Android and iOS tabs — General → Default search engine, and Advanced settings → Search engine → Others — and the article's tab markup does not resolve reliably to automated retrieval, so which one applies to iPadOS is unconfirmed.

These lists are usually longer than Apple's, and several of these browsers accept a custom engine defined by its query URL, which is the only route on iPad to something like Kagi or a self-hosted SearXNG instance in the address bar.

Which app opens links from Mail, Messages or a PDF is a third, separate setting: Settings → Apps → Default Apps → Browser App, which Apple documents and says needs a current iPadOS release, or the Default Browser App row inside a browser's own settings entry on earlier versions. In the European Union, iPadOS has shown a browser choice screen since the Digital Markets Act was applied to it — that screen chooses a browser, not an engine, and whichever browser you pick then applies its own default.

Spotlight is not Safari

Swiping down on the Home Screen, or pressing Command–Space if you have a Magic Keyboard attached, opens Spotlight. Spotlight indexes the iPad — apps, documents, mail, notes — and adds suggestions drawn from Apple's own services. It is not running a web search on your behalf in the way the address bar does. When a Spotlight result does take you to the web it hands the query to your default browser, so the engine you eventually land on is that browser's, which may not be Safari's.

The practical consequence: setting Safari to DuckDuckGo while Chrome is the default browser produces search results from Chrome's engine every time you start from Spotlight, which is a confusing symptom with a dull cause.

Then decide whose index you want

Having found the switch, the useful question is where the results should come from. Very few engines run a crawler and an index of their own: Google and Bing do, Brave Search and Mojeek do at smaller scale, Yandex and Baidu do in their own markets. Most of the rest license or resell those indexes — DuckDuckGo's web results lean heavily on Bing, Startpage serves Google's results without passing on the identifying details, Ecosia has drawn on both while directing advertising revenue to tree planting.

That distinction is what determines whether switching changes the results you see or only who watches you see them. Both are legitimate reasons to switch, but they are different reasons, and Apple's five-item list on iPad covers only two underlying indexes between them.

One piece of context for a setting this easy to change. The Department of Justice's closing argument demonstrative in United States v. Google LLC, filed in 2024, put Google's agreement with Apple at 28 percent of all US general search queries in 2020, out of roughly 50 percent covered by its default contracts altogether — 2020 data presented in 2024, in a case on appeal. What that buys is the setting staying where it was put. Consumer research tables published by Verian for the UK Competition and Markets Authority in 2024 show that among UK smartphone users who had actually changed their default browser, 56.7 percent called it very easy and only 2.8 percent found it difficult, while the privacy-branded browsers held 0.75 percent of defaults (DuckDuckGo) and 0.42 percent (Brave) against 42.3 percent for Safari. Those figures are self-reported, cover the default browser rather than the default search engine, and the ease question was asked only of people who had already switched. The gap between how easy it is and how rarely it happens is the whole of the reason the pre-set entry is worth what it is.

Frequently asked questions

Where is the search engine setting on an iPad?

In the Settings app, not in Safari: Settings → Apps → Safari → Search Engine, which is the single path Apple publishes for iPadOS 18, 26 and 27. On iPadOS 17 and earlier, Safari is listed in the Settings sidebar directly and the Apps step does not exist. Typing search engine into the Settings search field jumps to the same row from any version.

Can each Safari profile on iPad have its own search engine?

No. Profiles separate tab groups, favourites, history, cookies and extensions, but the search engine is set once for Safari as a whole and every profile uses it. The only split iPadOS offers is between normal and Private Browsing, using the Also Use in Private Browsing switch under the Search Engine row, which reveals a Private Search Engine row when turned off.

Why is the search engine option greyed out on my school iPad?

Because the iPad is supervised. Mobile Device Management and Apple School Manager can set or lock Safari's search engine, and the device cannot override it. Check Settings → General → VPN & Device Management for an installed configuration profile. Screen Time content restrictions, set by a family organizer, can produce the same symptom on a home iPad.

How do I use Kagi or Startpage on an iPad?

Not through Safari's Search Engine menu, which is a closed list. Use the engine's own iPad app if it has one, install a third-party browser that lists it, or define it as a custom engine by query URL in a browser that allows that. Adding the engine's page to the Home Screen also works and costs one extra tap.

Does changing Safari's engine change Chrome on the same iPad?

No. Each browser on iPadOS stores its own default inside its own app, so Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Brave and Edge can all be set to different engines simultaneously, and often are without the owner realising. If a search produced an unexpected engine, the first thing to check is which browser the query was actually typed into.

Will switching engines close my tabs or lose my history?

No. The change affects only where the next query is sent. Open tabs stay open, tab groups are untouched, and history, bookmarks and saved passwords are unaffected. A results page already on screen keeps showing the old engine's results until you run the search again, which is normal and not a sign the change failed.

Does the European browser choice screen set my iPad search engine?

No. The Digital Markets Act choice screen asks which browser should be the default; it does not ask about search engines. After choosing, that browser applies whatever default engine it ships with, which you then change inside that browser. Safari's own engine setting stays where it always was, in Settings under Apps.

How to change the default search engine on iPad