- ChatGPT’s traffic share fell from 77.43% to 56.72% in twelve months, per Similarweb data.
- Anthropic’s Claude nearly tripled its market share in March alone, jumping from 2.2% to 6.02%.
- Google Gemini quietly climbed to 25.46%—now a bigger threat to ChatGPT than every other competitor combined.
ChatGPT still controls the AI chatbot market. But the margin is shrinking fast. New traffic data from Similarweb shows OpenAI’s flagship product dropped from 77.43% of web visits a year ago to 56.72% today—a loss of roughly 20 percentage points in twelve months.
The biggest beneficiary isn’t who you’d expect. Google Gemini surged from 6% to 25.46% of chatbot traffic, likely fueled by Android integrations that route search queries into Gemini conversations. Google’s aggressive bundling strategy—pushing Gemini notifications and search redirects through its mobile ecosystem—appears to be working at scale.
Meanwhile, Anthropic’s Claude posted the most dramatic month-over-month growth of any chatbot. The model nearly tripled its traffic share from 2.2% to 6.02%, leapfrogging both DeepSeek (3.74%) and Grok (3.44%), reported THE DECODER. That’s a small number in absolute terms, but the trajectory is hard to ignore—especially given that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claimed in February that ChatGPT has as many users in Texas alone as Claude has across the entire US.
The AI Chatbot Market Is Fragmenting Faster Than Anyone Predicted
A year ago, the competitive landscape was simple: ChatGPT was the default, and everyone else was fighting for scraps. That’s no longer the case. Microsoft Copilot hit 1.99% (now including Microsoft 365 Chat traffic), and Perplexity landed at 1.64%. Together, the six major competitors now account for over 43% of chatbot traffic—up from roughly 22% a year ago.
The fragmentation mirrors what a16z found in its Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps report: ChatGPT reached 900 million weekly users, but one in five is also actively using a competitor. Multi-model usage is becoming the norm, not the exception. Users don’t pick one chatbot anymore—they rotate between two or three depending on the task.
For OpenAI, the trendline matters more than the current ranking. Losing 20 points of market share in a year while competitors grow suggests the company’s moat is product familiarity and first-mover brand recognition, not technical superiority. Claude’s rapid climb—driven by Anthropic’s reputation for coding and analytical tasks—shows that users will switch when a competitor offers a noticeably better experience for specific use cases.
Google’s rise is the quiet storyline here. Gemini at 25% doesn’t generate the same headlines as Claude’s triple-digit growth, but it represents the single largest redistribution of chatbot traffic in the past year. Google controls Android, Chrome, and Search—the three distribution channels that matter most for consumer AI adoption. The company also launched a native Gemini app for Mac this week, closing a gap that existed for two years.
The Similarweb data covers web traffic only—it doesn’t capture API usage, enterprise adoption, or in-app engagement on mobile. But as a proxy for consumer mindshare, the trend is clear: ChatGPT’s monopoly is over, and the AI chatbot market now has three real contenders instead of one.
Similarweb published the full dataset on its social channels on April 17, covering traffic share across all major AI chatbot platforms through March 2026.