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Looking at AI chatbot market share in 2026, ChatGPT still holds the largest share of generative AI web traffic, although the gap has narrowed quite a bit. In Similarweb’s June 2026 update, ChatGPT accounted for 52.7% of worldwide visits to the leading generative AI chatbot websites. Gemini followed at 27.8%, while Claude reached 9.2%.

Together, these three platforms generated almost 90% of the measured traffic. Everyone else was left competing for a much smaller part of the market.

The change becomes clearer when viewed over a longer period. ChatGPT held around 76% of generative AI website traffic in June 2025. By mid-2026, its share had fallen by more than 20%. Gemini climbed from roughly 9% to almost 28%, while Claude grew from less than 2% to just over 9%. Similarweb describes this as a change toward a three-platform market.

These figures measure visits to the main websites of standalone AI assistants, including desktop and mobile web traffic. They don’t cover every interaction with the underlying models. Someone using Copilot inside Microsoft 365, Gemini through another Google product or an AI model through an API may never visit the chatbot’s website at all (native mobile apps also tell a somewhat different story).

The table therefore shows how people directly use the major AI chatbot websites. It leaves a big amount of embedded, mobile and enterprise usage outside the picture, which helps explain why market-share reports sometimes produce very different numbers.

ChatGPT is losing marketshare, but the number of users remains high

A falling market share can easily be mistaken for falling usage. In ChatGPT’s case, the numbers tell a more complicated story.

Similarweb estimates that ChatGPT’s absolute web traffic remained relatively stable over the past year. During the same period, average monthly visits across generative AI platforms grew by 70%, reaching 9.5 billion. The number of unique visitors increased by 57% to 655 million, while AI app downloads rose by 58%.

In other words, the market around ChatGPT grew much faster than ChatGPT itself. A platform can maintain roughly the same number of visits and still give up a large part of its share when competing platforms are adding traffic at a higher rate.

There is also very little friction involved in switching between AI chatbots. Users do not need to abandon ChatGPT before trying Gemini or Claude. They can open another tab, compare the answers and gradually divide their work between several platforms (many people now use one tool for research, another for writing and a third for tasks connected to a particular software ecosystem).

ChatGPT also continued growing through its mobile app while its share of open web traffic declined. All the data describes a platform whose overall reach remains substantial, but whose former dominance is being diluted by a rapidly expanding category.

So far, ChatGPT’s market-share decline reflects a change in competitive position rather than a collapse in demand. It remains the largest AI assistant by web traffic, although it now has to share a market it once largely controlled.

Is Gemini overtaking ChatGPT?

Gemini has gained more ground than any other direct ChatGPT competitor. Its share of worldwide generative AI web traffic rose from under 9% to around 28% in one year, accounting for most of the market share ChatGPT surrendered during the same period. They are now firmly in second place.

The growth also appears in mobile usage. Sensor Tower placed Gemini at 27.7% of global AI assistant app users by the end of May 2026, compared with ChatGPT’s 46.4%. Claude followed at 10.3%. These figures use a different methodology from web-traffic reports, but they point in the same direction. TechCrunch reported the Sensor Tower findings.

Google says the Gemini app now reaches 950 million monthly active users, up from 750 million at the end of 2025. Its daily active user base has tripled over the past year, according to Alphabet’s Q2 2026 results.

The standalone app is only part of the story. Google can introduce Gemini to people through products they already use:

• Search: Gemini 3.5 Flash is now the default model for AI Mode worldwide.
• Workspace: Gemini features are built into Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides and Drive.
• Android: Gemini is increasingly integrated into phones, tablets, watches and in-car systems.
• Chrome: Users can summarize pages, compare information and complete tasks without opening a separate chatbot.

This gives Google a distribution advantage few AI companies can match. Somebody starts using Gemini while checking email or searching for something, without making a deliberate decision to switch AI platforms. Google outlined the wider integration across Search and its other products at I/O 2026.

Gemini’s reach could soon extend further through Apple. In January 2026, the companies announced a multi-year collaboration under which future Apple Foundation Models will use Gemini models and Google Cloud technology, including for a more personalized version of Siri. Apple and Google confirmed the agreement in a joint statement.

Siri activity won’t automatically count as traffic to Gemini’s website (an important distinction when reading market-share charts). Still, the partnership puts Google’s AI technology inside another huge ecosystem. Gemini’s growth depends on being available at the right moment, inside tools people already have opened.

Where the other AI chatbots stand

After ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, the market drops off quite a bit. DeepSeek, Grok, Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity collectively account for around 9% of worldwide generative AI chatbot web traffic. None currently holds more than 4% on its own.

Each platform still has a distinct reason for remaining relevant:

• DeepSeek, 3.6%: DeepSeek’s biggest advantage is affordability and open access. Its models have attracted developers and businesses looking for lower API costs, particularly outside the US market. The company released its V4 models as open-source software, while independent testing found V4-Flash substantially cheaper to run than comparable models from major Western providers. Reuters covered the cost comparison. That developer adoption will not always appear as visits to DeepSeek’s chatbot website.
• Grok, 2.5%: Grok benefits from direct access to X and its stream of real-time posts. It is available through X, grok.com and separate mobile apps, giving xAI several ways to reach users. xAI describes X content, web search and citations as central parts of Grok. Its connection with X provides visibility, although it has yet to translate that exposure into a web-traffic share comparable with Gemini or Claude.
• Microsoft Copilot, 2%: Copilot’s standalone website represents only one part of the product. Microsoft also places it inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, Edge and Windows. This makes its web share particularly difficult to compare with standalone chatbots. A lot of people use Copilot while working without ever visiting copilot.microsoft.com. Microsoft’s Copilot overview emphasizes this integration with workplace content and Microsoft 365 applications.
• Perplexity, 1.1%: Perplexity has built a smaller but more specialized audience around research and AI-powered search. The platform processed 780 million queries in May 2025 and was growing by more than 20% month over month at the time, according to CEO Aravind Srinivas. TechCrunch reported the figures from Bloomberg’s 2025 Tech Summit. Since then, larger assistants have added their own live search, research and citation features, making Perplexity’s original selling point less exclusive.

These platforms remain significant within particular regions, professions and use cases. Their combined consumer web traffic, however, still places them in a separate tier from the three market leaders.

What a fragmented AI market means for marketers

AI discovery no longer follows a single path. Someone will find a product through Gemini, compare alternatives in ChatGPT and use Perplexity to check the sources before visiting a website. In a lot of cases, website visits never happens.

A 2026 Pew Research Center survey found that 44% of US adults had used ChatGPT, while 24% had used Gemini and 17% had used Copilot. Smaller groups used Meta AI, Grok and Claude. These categories overlap, since respondents could use several platforms, which is precisely the point: people are gradually building their own mix of AI tools. Pew Research Center published the full platform breakdown.

Visibility on one platform also doesn’t guarantee visibility on another. Semrush analyzed 126 million AI search prompts and found considerable differences in how platforms select and present sources. ChatGPT cited an average of 15 sources per response, while Gemini averaged three. The platforms also relied on different combinations of websites, publishers, community discussions, YouTube and reference sources.

For marketers, this creates a few practical priorities:

• Track platforms separately. Monitor brand mentions, citations, sentiment and referral traffic across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity. A single combined “AI traffic” figure can hide which platforms are gaining influence.
• Create information worth referencing. Original research, clear statistics, expert commentary, detailed product information and regularly updated pages give AI systems something specific to quote or summarize.
• Strengthen the brand beyond its own website. AI answers draw information from news coverage, review sites, social platforms, forums and video content. BrightEdge found Facebook appearing as a source in 19.5 million Google AI Overview answers, with Instagram referenced 877,000 times. BrightEdge’s study suggests social content is becoming part of the broader search and discovery ecosystem.
• Keep traditional SEO in the strategy. AI assistants still rely heavily on information they can discover, understand and verify online. Technical accessibility, strong pages and credible external coverage remain useful, even when the final answer appears inside a chatbot.

One more thing to keep in mind: a chatbot can have many users without sending much traffic to other websites. In March 2026, ChatGPT generated 78% of all website visits coming from AI chatbots, while Gemini generated only 9%. This was despite Gemini having a much larger share of overall chatbot use. StatCounter’s data shows that people are more likely to click through to a website from some AI platforms than others.

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