New Data: OpenAI’s Lead Is Contracting as AI Competition Intensifies

OpenAI’s rivals are cutting into ChatGPT’s lead. The top chatbot’s market share fell from 69.1% to 45.3% between January 2025 and January 2026 among daily U.S. users of its mobile app. Gemini, in the same time period, rose from 14.7% to 25.1% and Grok rose from 1.6% to 15.2%.

The data, obtained by Big Technology from mobile insights firm Apptopia, indicates the chatbot race has tightened meaningfully over the past year with Google’s surge showing up in the numbers. Overall, the chatbot market increased 152% since last January, according to Apptopia, with ChatGPT exhibiting healthy download growth.

On desktop and mobile web, a similar pattern appears, according to analytics firm Similarweb. Visits to ChatGPT went from 3.8 billion to 5.7 billion between January 2025 and January 2026, a 50% increase, while visits to Gemini went from 267.7 million to 2 billion, a 647% increase. ChatGPT is still far and away the leader in visits, but it has company in the race now.

“ChatGPT showed really strong growth for most of 2025,” said David Carr, insights news and research editor at Similarweb. “That said, we did see a ChatGPT traffic dip in November / December, which coincided with a growth spurt for Gemini. Preliminary data for January show ChatGPT traffic recovering but not back to its peak of 6 billion + visits in October. And Gemini continues to grow strongly, up another 17% month over month based on a preliminary estimate for January.”

After experiencing torrid growth through most of 2025, the chatbot market itself leveled off somewhat in recent months. “The market is flattening a bit,” said Apptopia director of public relations Adam Blacker. “We likely have not hit peak GenAI apps, but this is an early inflection point where there may be a gap between early adopters and everyone else.”

Those early adopters’ enthusiasm has propelled generative AI forward in the years after ChatGPT’s release, but there is plenty of room to grow. Most devices Apptopia measured never use chatbots, so the race is far from settled as the AI apps fight for share.

There’s also evidence that the chatbot race is not zero-sum. Twenty percent of chatbot users were using at least two apps by the end of 2025, up from 5% at the end of 2023.

And finally, pure user numbers don’t tell the full story, since users spend different amounts of time with each chatbot on average. Even though Anthropic’s Claude doesn’t have close to as many users as ChatGPT or Gemini, the time people spend with it has surged from about ten minutes daily in June 2025 to more than thirty minutes today.

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