Ryan Haines / Android Authority
TL;DR
- ChatGPT has dominated the AI market since it launched nearly three years ago, but competitors are beginning to catch up.
- Data reveals Gemini more than doubled its traffic share over the past year as ChatGPT’s market hold started to chip away.
- ChatGPT still represents over 70% of generative AI web traffic, although Gemini holds over 10% for the first time.
OpenAI kicked off the AI race in late 2022 with the emergence of ChatGPT, the first mainstream chatbot powered by large language models (LLMs). Nearly three years later, the artificial intelligence landscape is ripe with competition. Companies like Google, Meta, Microsoft, Perplexity, Anthropic, and xAI are vying for users and market share as they challenge ChatGPT. Data shared by Similarweb on X this week revealed Google is steadily building momentum and stealing web traffic from OpenAI.
As the chart below reveals, ChatGPT had a staggering 86.6% of generative AI traffic share one year ago. Traffic share is a metric used to compare website activity to industry peers. It’s a proportion that represents the percentage of visitors a grouping of competing sites each receive in a particular market. In this case, this chart looks at the relative traffic share the 10 largest generative AI sites controlled over time.
Gemini earned the second-best spot in traffic share one year ago, but only represented 5.6% of total gen-AI traffic. Then, things got rocky for Google’s AI chatbot. The sudden emergence of DeepSeek in late 2024 caused usage of the platform to skyrocket. DeepSeek leapfrogged Gemini in traffic share, with the company holding 6.1% of traffic as of six months ago. Notably, Gemini’s traffic share was 5.9% six months ago.
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That figure suggests Gemini was still steadily growing, just not at the rapid pace of DeepSeek. As of three months ago, the buzz around DeepSeek fizzled out — its traffic share dropped to only 3.9% and the company fell behind Gemini once again. Gemini claimed 8.6% of generative AI traffic share three months ago. Fast-forward two months, and Gemini held 12.9% of the traffic share. At the same time, ChatGPT’s traffic share dipped to 74.1%.
As of today, the Similarweb data reveals ChatGPT holds 72.3% of generative AI traffic share, and Gemini slots in at second place with a 13.7% grasp. ChatGPT is still clearly the market leader, but Gemini is also clearly emerging as a threat. Google’s AI chatbot is the only one to claim over 10% of gen-AI web traffic share that isn’t named ChatGPT over the past year of data.
It’s also the sole AI platform to grow in every data period tracked by Similarweb. Competitors including DeepSeek and Perplexity experienced growth at various intervals, but Gemini was the only one to maintain the upward momentum consistently. In all, Gemini’s traffic share has more than doubled over the past year.
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