Tracking Market Share of Each LLM & What it Means…

ChatGPT Lost 22 Points of Market Share in 12 Months. Here’s Why That’s Not the Real Story.

SimilarWeb just dropped their first global AI tracker of 2026. Everyone’s talking about ChatGPT’s decline. I think they’re missing the point entirely.

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The Numbers Everyone’s Focused On

Yeah, ChatGPT went from 86.7% market share to 64.5% in a year. That’s a big drop. Gemini climbed from 5.7% to 21.5%. Grok tripled. The AI chatbot wars are real.

Here’s the timeline:

A year ago, ChatGPT owned everything. 86.7% of all gen AI traffic. Gemini was barely a blip at 5.7%. Claude, Perplexity, Copilot—all fighting over scraps under 2%.

Six months ago, things started shifting. ChatGPT dropped to 78.6%. Gemini doubled to 8.6%. DeepSeek showed up out of nowhere at 4.8%.

Three months ago, the trend accelerated. ChatGPT at 74.1%, Gemini at 12.9%. The long tail started getting interesting.

Today? ChatGPT sits at 64.5%. Gemini broke 20% and hit 21.5%. Grok crossed 3% and is breathing down DeepSeek’s neck at 3.4%. Claude holding steady at 2%.

The AI chatbot market went from a monopoly to an actual competition in 12 months.

But Here’s What Everyone’s Getting Wrong

These traffic numbers only count people going directly to chatbot websites. That’s it. They don’t count AI that’s already baked into products people use every day.

And that’s a massive blind spot.

Google has been quietly embedding AI into Search for over a year now. AI Overviews. AI Mode. Every time someone searches on Google and gets an AI-generated summary at the top of their results, that’s an AI interaction. It just doesn’t show up in SimilarWeb’s tracker because the user never left Google.

Think about that for a second.

Google processes something like 8.5 billion searches a day. Even if AI Overviews only appear on 15-20% of those queries, we’re talking about 1.3 to 1.7 billion daily AI interactions. The entire standalone chatbot category—ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, all of them combined—gets maybe 290 million daily visits total.

Google’s embedded AI usage probably dwarfs the entire chatbot market by 5x or more.

My Take: Google Already Won the Consumer AI Race

I know that sounds bold. But when you factor in AI Overviews and AI Mode, Google is almost certainly the dominant player in consumer-facing AI assistants. Not ChatGPT.

OpenAI built an incredible product. They’re still the best standalone chatbot experience. But Google did something arguably smarter—they put AI directly into the workflow billions of people already have. No new app to download. No habit to change. Just better search results.

That’s the distribution advantage that’s almost impossible to beat.

ChatGPT’s path to winning requires changing user behavior. Google’s path to winning just requires users to keep doing what they’ve always done.

What This Actually Means If You’re Running an eCommerce Brand

Stop thinking about “which AI chatbot should I use” and start thinking about “where are my customers interacting with AI.”

Search is changing faster than your SEO strategy. AI Overviews are eating clicks from traditional search results. If you’re still optimizing purely for blue links, you’re optimizing for a shrinking piece of the pie. Your content strategy needs to account for how AI summarizes and surfaces information—not just how Google ranks pages.

Your customers are using multiple AI tools. The fragmentation in this market means different customer segments prefer different platforms. Some people live in ChatGPT. Others use whatever’s built into their browser or phone. A growing chunk just uses Google’s AI without even thinking about it as “AI.” Understanding this matters for how you think about product discovery.

The AI chatbot market isn’t going away. ChatGPT losing share doesn’t mean it’s dying. 64.5% of a rapidly growing market is still massive. And tools like Perplexity and Claude serve specific use cases really well. But the biggest consumer AI story isn’t happening in standalone apps—it’s happening inside products people already use.

The Bigger Picture

Total daily visits to AI tools grew from about 260 million in July to 290 million in January. The market is expanding even as shares get redistributed.

We’re watching a technology market mature in real time. First there was a clear winner. Now there’s real competition. Eventually we’ll probably see consolidation and specialization.

The brands that figure out how to be visible across this fragmented landscape—not just in traditional search, not just in one chatbot, but wherever their customers are asking questions and making decisions—those are the ones that’ll win.

Everyone else will wonder what happened.

We help eCommerce brands navigate this stuff. If you want to talk about how AI is changing your marketing strategy, reach out. Want AI LLM SEO specifically? See our packages here!

All data was taken from Similar Web here.