The era of OpenAI's absolute dominance is coming to an end. According to recent data from Similarweb, ChatGPT's market share of total traffic has plummeted from 77.43% to 56.72% over the past year. As recently as February, Sam Altman claimed that ChatGPT’s user base in Texas alone rivaled Claude’s entire US audience; however, the data tells a different story. We are witnessing OpenAI’s position weaken under the pressure of aggressive distribution and the rapid growth of its rivals.
The primary beneficiary of this market shift is Google Gemini, whose share has surged from 6% to 25.46%. The tech giant’s success is fueled by the large-scale integration of Gemini into the Android ecosystem, where OS-level notifications direct user search queries straight to the chatbot. Meanwhile, Anthropic’s Claude is also showing a significant breakthrough, jumping from a 2.2% to a 6.02% market share within a single month, allowing the company to overtake competitors like DeepSeek and Grok.
Currently, DeepSeek holds 3.74% of the market, followed closely by Grok at 3.44%. Microsoft Copilot stands at 1.99% (accounting for Microsoft 365 Chat traffic), while Perplexity holds 1.64%. These figures provide a clear snapshot of the current power dynamics within the industry.
For executives and decision-makers, this trend is a compelling reason to re-evaluate current AI strategies. Betting solely on OpenAI as a single provider is becoming an increasingly risky move. The drop in ChatGPT's share to 56.72% proves that Google’s distribution power and Claude’s qualitative growth are fundamentally reshaping the AI landscape. To avoid the trap of vendor lock-in, businesses should now seriously consider diversifying their model stacks.