According to the latest web traffic data, ChatGPT remains at the top of AI chatbots, but its lead over rivals has noticeably narrowed, and among them Claude, a product of Anthropic, has recorded the fastest growth of all competing platforms.
According to ITNA citing Visual Capitalist, based on Similarweb data, ChatGPT recorded about 5.9 billion website visits in September 2026, equivalent to 56.4 percent of total global AI chatbot traffic. Google’s Gemini is second with 2.6 billion visits and a 25 percent share; together these two platforms account for more than 80 percent of all visits in this space.
Claude’s sixfold jump
A notable point in this report is Claude’s rise from fifth to third place over the past year. This chatbot’s share of total global traffic rose from 2.3 percent in October 2025 to 9.6 percent in September 2026; a more than fourfold increase in market share, equivalent to an approximately sixfold jump in monthly visits (from 157 million to about one billion visits). That figure now exceeds the combined visits of four other rivals, namely DeepSeek, Grok, Copilot and Perplexity.
By contrast, Gemini has also seen significant growth, with its monthly visits increasing from 1.1 billion to 2.6 billion, about a 2.5-fold rise; a growth that mainly occurred after the release of Gemini 3 in late 2025 and as the Gemini app’s monthly active users surpassed 750 million.
On the other hand, the combined share of the four smaller rivals-DeepSeek, Grok, Copilot and Perplexity-fell from 11.4 percent to 8.1 percent.
Most-used AI chatbots in 2026
Reasons for Claude’s growth
According to the report, Claude’s acceleration began in early 2026, when Anthropic ran a Super Bowl ad in February emphasizing Claude’s ad-free nature, at the same time ChatGPT began showing ads to free users. A few weeks later Anthropic declined to provide its AI to the Pentagon for broad surveillance of American citizens or for use in fully autonomous weapons; a decision that coincided with Claude reaching the top of the U.S. App Store.
The report adds that Claude’s growth is also due to Anthropic’s focus on programming and knowledge-work use cases, alongside increasing public awareness of the product.
Claude’s share reached 8 percent in April 2026 and has continued to rise at a gentler slope since then.
Over the same period, ChatGPT’s share moved from 53.7 percent in April back to 56.4 percent in September, while Gemini’s share declined from 26.7 percent to 25 percent.
It should be noted these statistics cover only desktop and mobile-web visits to each chatbot’s site and do not include use of apps, APIs, or embedded AI in other products.