ChatGPT Leads as Gemini Takes Over a Quarter of AI Web Traffic

ChatGPT remains the largest generative AI destination on the web, but its lead narrowed substantially after the surge observed in 2025. Similarweb’s July 2026 analysis places ChatGPT at roughly 53% of worldwide generative AI website visits in May 2026, down from about 76% in June 2025, while Gemini rose from below 9% to approximately 27–28% and Claude moved from around 2% to nearly 9%.

The newer figures confirm the original direction of travel without showing that ChatGPT has been displaced or abandoned. What changed is the structure of the market: creators, publishers and independent businesses now face several AI destinations large enough to shape discovery, research and production habits.

The traffic shift reflects a growing category

ChatGPT’s declining percentage does not, by itself, demonstrate declining use. The same measurement indicates that its absolute visit count remained broadly flat while the category expanded, allowing faster-growing competitors to take a larger share of the total.

This is a denominator effect. A platform can retain approximately the same volume of visits and still lose share when the combined audience for competing services grows more quickly. The defensible conclusion is therefore that ChatGPT’s relative dominance weakened, not that its web audience collapsed.

The measurement also has a strict boundary: it concerns visits to generative AI websites. It does not represent every interaction occurring through mobile applications, APIs, workplace software, Google Search, Android or assistants embedded in other products. Calling it total AI market share would combine channels that the comparison does not measure.

Gemini turned its early momentum into material web share

Gemini’s gain is now too large to describe as a marginal challenge. Moving from a single-digit portion of measured visits to more than a quarter means Google’s assistant has become a major destination in its own right, even though ChatGPT still attracts approximately twice its web share.

Google’s wider distribution matters when interpreting that rise. Gemini exists as a standalone app, while related AI experiences also appear within products people may already use for search, mobile computing and office work. Website visits capture deliberate activity at the Gemini destination, but they cannot express the complete reach of those integrations.

The audience disclosure for the standalone product nevertheless points in the same direction. During its February 4, 2026 earnings call, Alphabet said the Gemini app had more than 750 million monthly active users and that engagement per user had increased, especially following the December launch of Gemini 3.

Those figures strengthen the case that Gemini’s growth extends beyond incidental exposure through Google’s ecosystem. They do not establish why individual users chose the product, how frequently each person used it or how much activity originated on any particular device.

ChatGPT’s smaller share still represents enormous scale

Independent web measurements and company audience disclosures answer different questions. The first compares website visits within a defined category; the second describes activity under a company’s own product definitions and can include channels beyond the public website.

OpenAI’s February 27, 2026 update put ChatGPT at more than 900 million weekly active users, alongside more than 50 million consumer subscribers and over 9 million paying business users. These company figures show that a lower share of category traffic can coexist with a vast active audience and a substantial paid customer base.

ChatGPT’s weekly figure cannot be ranked directly against Gemini’s monthly figure. The reporting periods differ, and the companies may use different definitions, eligibility rules and methods for counting active accounts. The sound comparison is narrower: ChatGPT remains the leading website in the independent traffic dataset, while both companies describe products operating at global scale.

Claude makes the contest broader than ChatGPT versus Gemini

Claude’s growth changes the shape of the comparison even though its measured web presence remains much smaller than either leader’s. Its share increased several times over from a low base, turning it into a material third destination rather than statistical background.

Gemini recorded the larger gain in percentage points, while Claude delivered the stronger proportional increase relative to its starting position. These are different measurements, so neither cancels the other: one describes how much of the overall market shifted, and the other describes how rapidly a smaller participant expanded.

This distinction matters in the creator economy because platform size and audience character are not interchangeable. A service with a smaller overall audience may still be important for a particular type of research, writing or technical work, while a broadly distributed product may reach more people through routine consumer activity.

Fragmentation changes what AI visibility means for creators

The clearest consequence is that performance on one assistant no longer represents performance across the category. ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude have separate interfaces, retrieval systems and distribution channels, so a citation, referral or strong presence on one platform does not establish equivalent visibility on the others.

Market-wide traffic figures are useful for understanding the competitive direction, but they cannot identify which assistant matters most to a particular creator or publication. That requires first-party evidence such as referral records, attributed subscriptions, enquiries or sales. Broad share and individual business value measure different things.

The changing mix also affects production dependence. Writers, designers and other independent professionals may use several assistants for different tasks without replacing one completely. Such overlapping use allows challengers to grow while the incumbent retains a large audience, making the market less zero-sum than a simple ranking suggests.

The lasting result of the 2025 surge

The late-2025 narrative was directionally correct: Gemini was gaining ground while ChatGPT’s relative share declined. The subsequent evidence makes the shift more consequential because Gemini progressed beyond an emerging challenger and now represents more than a quarter of measured worldwide generative AI website traffic.

ChatGPT nevertheless remains the largest web destination and continues to disclose an exceptionally large active audience. The market has not swapped one dominant assistant for another; it has moved toward several substantial products whose reach is measured through different channels. For the creator economy, the durable lesson is fragmentation, not ChatGPT’s disappearance.

ChatGPT Still Leads as Gemini Takes More Than a Quarter of AI Web Traffic