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ChatGPT’s long slide in web traffic share appears to have broken, at least for now. New data from Similarweb shows OpenAI’s chatbot grew again after two straight months of decline, even as Google’s Gemini crossed 2 billion monthly visits for the first time. The numbers, first flagged by Similarweb itself on September 5, 2026, and echoed by outlets including Search Engine Journal and Business Insider, capture a market that looked like a one-horse race as recently as early 2025 and now looks like something closer to a genuine contest in the fast-moving AI and machine learning space.
Similarweb tracks web traffic to AI chatbot sites and publishes the results as a rough proxy for market share, since neither OpenAI nor Google discloses precise user numbers for ChatGPT or Gemini. In its most recent post, Similarweb said that “ChatGPT vs. Gemini website visit growth continues to shift, with Gemini topping 2 billion monthly visits for the first time while ChatGPT grew after two consecutive months of decline.” That single sentence contains two separate stories: Gemini hitting a scale milestone, and ChatGPT halting a skid that had worried OpenAI watchers through the summer.
The traffic figures are web visits only. They exclude the ChatGPT and Gemini mobile apps, API usage billed through OpenAI’s and Google’s developer platforms, and any usage inside Workspace, Search, or Android where Gemini is baked directly into the product rather than visited as a standalone site. That distinction matters for reading the data correctly, and it is one of the recurring caveats analysts attach to every Similarweb-based chatbot ranking.
Before this rebound, ChatGPT had been losing web traffic share for two consecutive months, part of a longer erosion that stretches back over a year. Technology commentator Timothy Hughes summarized the trend on X, noting that “ChatGPT’s share of genAI web traffic dipped below 70% over the past year while Gemini climbed toward ~20% (and Grok kept gaining),” a shift that Hughes attributed directly to Similarweb’s tracking data. In a separate post, Hughes cited even sharper numbers: ChatGPT’s share falling “from 87% to 68%” over 2025 while Gemini “tripled its share to 18%,” a swing he called out as one of the more dramatic reversals in the young chatbot market.
The rebound doesn’t erase that longer decline. It does, however, complicate the narrative that Gemini was on an uninterrupted march toward parity. A single month of renewed ChatGPT growth is not proof the erosion has stopped, but it is the first data point in months that runs against the trend, and traffic analysts will be watching the next reporting cycle closely to see if it holds.
For Google, the headline number is simpler: Gemini’s website now draws more than 2 billion visits a month, according to Similarweb, a threshold it had not previously reached. That milestone caps roughly 18 months of steady gains that started from a low base. As recently as January 2025, Gemini held just 5% of worldwide gen-AI chatbot traffic share, according to Similarweb’s Global AI Tracker data reported by Search Engine Journal. A year later, that figure had climbed to 21%, and by February 2026 it stood at 24.4%, per a separate Similarweb Global AI Tracker snapshot cited by The Decoder.
Google has pushed Gemini into Search, Gmail, Android, and Workspace over the same period, which almost certainly pulls in visits that wouldn’t otherwise reach a standalone chatbot site. That distribution advantage, tying an AI assistant to products already used by billions of people, is the single biggest structural difference between how Gemini and ChatGPT acquire users, and it likely explains a meaningful share of Gemini’s growth curve independent of any change in model quality.
Different Similarweb data cuts, pulled by different outlets at different points, tell a broadly consistent story even though the exact percentages vary by methodology. The table below lines up the snapshots as reported.
Read across the rows and the pattern holds even as the specific numbers shift: ChatGPT’s share has fallen every time it has been measured over the past 18 months, and Gemini’s has risen every time. The September rebound Similarweb flagged this week is the first sign that direction might be changing, but it’s a single data point set against a much longer trend line.
Anyone citing a single “market share” number for ChatGPT or Gemini should read the fine print. Similarweb runs at least two distinct measurement products referenced in recent reporting: a broader panel-based traffic estimate and a narrower Global AI Tracker. The two don’t always agree in a given month, which is why the June 2025 panel figure (76% ChatGPT) and the full-year swing figure (87% to 68%) don’t line up perfectly even though both come from Similarweb data.
None of this makes the trend fake. Every methodology Similarweb has published over the past year points the same direction: ChatGPT down, Gemini up, at least until this month’s rebound. But the exact percentage point gap between the two chatbots depends heavily on which tracker, which date range, and which publication is doing the citing, and that’s worth flagging every time a specific figure gets repeated as gospel.
ChatGPT and Gemini dominate the headlines, but Similarweb’s gen-AI traffic share tables track a longer list of chatbots, several of which show up repeatedly in recent reporting: Anthropic’s Claude, xAI’s Grok, DeepSeek, Perplexity, and Microsoft’s Copilot. Hughes’s July post specifically called out Grok as a gainer alongside Gemini, writing that Grok “kept gaining” even as the overall market moved away from ChatGPT.
Open-weight rivals add another layer competition that Similarweb’s chatbot-site tracker doesn’t fully capture. Models released as open weights, like Alibaba’s Qwen family, get downloaded and run locally or through third-party hosts rather than visited as a single website, so their real-world usage sits outside the traffic-share numbers driving this story even as they add pressure to the broader market.
The pattern across this table is the same one visible in the ChatGPT-Gemini numbers: the chatbots gaining share fastest tend to be the ones riding an existing distribution channel rather than pulling every visitor in cold through a standalone product. Gemini has Search and Android. Grok has X. Copilot has Windows. ChatGPT, by contrast, built its lead almost entirely as a destination site people chose to visit on its own merits, which may be part of why holding that lead against distribution-backed rivals has gotten harder over time.
Google’s strategy over the past year has been to put Gemini in front of users who never typed a chatbot URL into their browser. Gemini now surfaces inside Google Search results, drafts and summarizes email in Gmail, sits inside Docs and Sheets through Workspace, and ships as the default assistant on Android phones. Google has also pushed that distribution into new demographics directly, such as its rollout of free Gemini access to students in Saudi Arabia, a pattern of institutional deals that adds visits well outside the standalone chatbot site. Every one of those touchpoints can register as a Gemini visit or interaction without the user ever making an active decision to “go use an AI chatbot.”
That distribution advantage compounds. A Gmail user who tries Gemini’s drafting suggestion once, without seeking it out, is a very different acquisition event than a ChatGPT user who typed chat.openai.com into their browser because a colleague recommended it. Google doesn’t need to win the “best chatbot” argument to keep growing Gemini’s numbers. It needs Android, Search, and Workspace to keep shipping updates that surface the assistant more often, and by every account it has kept doing exactly that through 2026.
The public data doesn’t spell out a specific cause for ChatGPT’s September uptick, and neither OpenAI nor Similarweb has published a detailed breakdown of what changed. What’s confirmed is narrower: growth resumed after two months of decline, reversing a direction that had held for most of the prior year. Any explanation beyond that, whether tied to a product update, a marketing push, or seasonal usage patterns, would be speculation not supported by the current reporting.
What is clear is that ChatGPT’s earlier decline wasn’t a one-time dip. It ran for roughly two full months by Similarweb’s count, on top of a slide that had already cut the chatbot’s global traffic share by more than 20 percentage points over the prior year. A single month of growth is a meaningful data point, not proof the longer erosion is over.
Web traffic numbers feed directly into how investors, advertisers, and enterprise buyers size up the AI chatbot market. Business Insider’s coverage of the Similarweb data framed it starkly, running a piece titled “The ChatGPT Vs. Gemini Chart That Should Worry OpenAI”, credited to Forbes journalist Richard Nieva, which used the traffic trend line to question whether OpenAI’s first-mover advantage was eroding faster than its funding round valuations assumed.
Traffic share is also a rough proxy for the size of the audience each company can eventually monetize through subscriptions, advertising, or enterprise licensing. A shrinking share doesn’t necessarily mean shrinking absolute usage, since the overall gen-AI chatbot market has grown enormously since ChatGPT’s 2022 launch. But investors sizing up OpenAI’s next funding round, or enterprise buyers picking a default assistant to standardize on, both look at share trends as a signal of momentum, and momentum has clearly favored Gemini for most of the past 18 months.
ChatGPT launched in November 2022 and spent roughly two years as the default answer to “which AI chatbot do you use.” Google’s initial Gemini rollout struggled to dent that lead, and as late as January 2025, Similarweb data put ChatGPT at 86% of global gen-AI chatbot traffic share against just 5% for Gemini, a gap wide enough that “market share battle” barely applied.
The past 18 months rewrote that picture. Google folded Gemini into products with billions of existing users, xAI’s Grok rode the X platform to steady gains, and Anthropic’s Claude built a strong enterprise and developer following even without matching ChatGPT’s consumer scale. By early 2026, ChatGPT’s share had roughly been cut in half from its 2025 peak on some measures, turning what had been a monopoly into a genuine multi-player market. Whether September’s ChatGPT rebound marks the start of a stabilization or just a one-month blip is the open question heading into the rest of 2026. That growing multi-player market has come with more scrutiny too, including recent safety research examining how far these models will go under pressure, a reminder that adoption numbers are only one side of the ledger as chatbots reach billions of monthly visits.
Similarweb itself put the clearest frame on the latest data, stating that “ChatGPT vs. Gemini website visit growth continues to shift, with Gemini topping 2 billion monthly visits for the first time while ChatGPT grew after two consecutive months of decline” (source).
Technology commentator Timothy Hughes has tracked the longer arc of the same data, writing that “ChatGPT’s share of genAI web traffic dipped below 70% over the past year while Gemini climbed toward ~20% (and Grok kept gaining)” (source). In an earlier post covering the full-year picture, Hughes noted that “SimilarWeb shared statistics on AI web traffic for 2025, with ChatGPT’s share falling from 87% to 68% and Google’s Gemini tripling its share to 18% in the past year” (source).
Search Engine Journal reported the January 2026 snapshot in direct terms: “ChatGPT accounted for 64% of worldwide traffic share among gen AI chatbot websites as of January, while Google’s Gemini reached 21%, according to Similarweb’s Global AI Tracker.” And Business Insider ran Forbes journalist Richard Nieva’s analysis under the headline “The ChatGPT Vs. Gemini Chart That Should Worry OpenAI” (source), signaling that the trend has moved from a niche analytics curiosity to a storyline mainstream business press is now covering directly.
Set side by side, OpenAI and Google are running two different playbooks to win the same category. OpenAI has leaned on ChatGPT as a standalone brand and product, expanding through its own app, API partnerships, and enterprise contracts sold directly by OpenAI. That strategy built the category from scratch and produced the 86% share Similarweb measured back in January 2025.
Google’s playbook leans on distribution it already owns. Rather than convincing users to adopt a new destination, it embeds Gemini into Search, Android, Gmail, and Workspace, tools most of its audience already opens daily. That approach trades a slower brand-building phase for a much larger addressable base once the integration ships. The Similarweb numbers suggest the distribution approach has been the more effective growth lever over the past 18 months, even if it says nothing certain about which chatbot users prefer once they’re comparing the two side by side.
A few predictions follow reasonably from the data reported so far, though all remain forecasts rather than confirmed outcomes:
None of this traffic data directly measures API usage, which is where most developers and enterprises actually interact with these models rather than through the consumer chatbot sites. A company building on OpenAI’s API isn’t necessarily affected by ChatGPT.com losing web visitors, and a team using Gemini through Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform isn’t directly benefiting from Gemini.google.com’s traffic milestone either.
What the numbers do signal is momentum and mindshare, both of which tend to influence which platform gets the benefit of the doubt in procurement conversations, which ecosystem attracts more third-party tooling, and which company can justify continued heavy investment in model development. A widening enterprise data moat for Google, built on Workspace integration, or a stabilizing consumer base for OpenAI, built on the September rebound holding up, would each shape those downstream decisions differently over the coming quarters.
Is Gemini now more popular than ChatGPT?
No. Similarweb’s most recent data shows ChatGPT still holding a larger share of gen-AI chatbot web traffic than Gemini, even after Gemini’s gains. The rate of change has favored Gemini for most of the past 18 months, but ChatGPT has not been overtaken on the metrics reported so far.
What does “2 billion monthly visits” for Gemini actually measure?
It refers to web traffic to Gemini’s site as tracked by Similarweb, not total users, app downloads, or API calls. It’s the first time Gemini has crossed that particular threshold in Similarweb’s reporting.
Why did ChatGPT’s traffic decline for two months before this rebound?
Similarweb’s public statements confirm the decline happened but don’t detail a specific cause. Any explanation for the cause would be speculative until OpenAI or Similarweb publishes more detail.
How much of Gemini’s traffic growth comes from Google Search and Android integration?
Similarweb’s public data doesn’t break out integrated-surface traffic from standalone site visits, so an exact percentage isn’t available. Analysts broadly agree distribution through Search, Android, and Workspace is a major contributing factor.
Are Claude, Grok, and other chatbots included in these market share numbers?
Yes. Similarweb’s gen-AI chatbot tracking includes Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, Perplexity, and Copilot alongside ChatGPT and Gemini, though this article’s confirmed percentage figures focus on ChatGPT and Gemini since those are the two with verified numbers in current reporting.
Does losing web traffic share mean ChatGPT is losing users overall?
Not necessarily. Web traffic share is one measurement of one usage surface. It doesn’t capture mobile app usage, API-based usage, or enterprise deployments, all of which could move independently of the web traffic trend.
Where does this data come from and how reliable is it?
The figures in this article come from Similarweb, a third-party web analytics company, as reported directly by Similarweb and cited by outlets including Search Engine Journal, Business Insider, and The Decoder. Neither OpenAI nor Google has published its own competing traffic figures to confirm or dispute these numbers.
Will this trend continue for the rest of 2026?
That’s not yet known. September’s ChatGPT rebound breaks a two-month decline, but it’s one data point against an 18-month trend favoring Gemini. Analysts will need at least another month or two of data before calling it a durable reversal.
Dr. Heinrich Vogel reviews shattered.io technical coverage for accuracy, checking explanations against primary specifications and published research before they go live. His background is in cryptography and security engineering.
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