Key Highlights:
- According to a new Similarwebreport, ChatGPT’s grip in the generative AI market appears to be slipping away.
- The report hints at a decline of 19.2 percent in website traffic year over year.
- The drop in ChatGPT’s traffic has somewhat benefitted Gemini, as the website traffic has bumped up by 12.8 percent year over year.
AI assistants have become a staple of many these days; be it taking help for summarizing emails, to streamlining workflow, to getting recommendations on TVs, there are a lot AI assistants can do right now. And, when we talk of AI assistants, ChatGPT comes to everyone’s mind without any doubt, and rightly so. OpenAI’s AI assistant currently has 700 million weekly active users.
ChatGPT’s grip in the market is slipping away; Gemini is the one benefitting
However, it seems ChatGPT’s grip on the generative AI market is no longer as it used to be. That’s according to the latest data from Similarweb. The report shows a noticeable change in how users are choosing AI tools, with Google Gemini emerging as the fastest-growing rival over the past year. Per the report, ChatGPT’s share of global generative AI website traffic has dropped from 87.2 percent to 68 percent year over year.
While ChatGPT remains the undisputed market leader, the decline in the website traffic suggests that with growing competition and alternatives available, users aren’t shying away from exploring other options. Here, I’m specifically talking about image generation and multimodal tasks. Google’s Gemini has been the one that is getting benefits from this shift. The report suggests that Gemini AI assistant had seen a surge in traffic in a year. What used to be 5.4 percent has grown to 18.2 percent now.
That growth coincides with the rollout of Google’s Gemini 3, the latest model, due to which Sam Altman, fast-tracked GPT-5.2 model. That’s not all; the introduction of the Nano Banana Pro image generator has also steered some of the traffic from ChatGPT. Even after OpenAI rolled out its upgraded image-generation inside ChatGPT, Gemini continues to lead in perceived image quality. Analysts note that Nano Banana Pro excels at producing clean visuals for presentations, diagrams, and infographics, areas where prompt accuracy and text handling matter more than raw creativity.
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Other AI assistants are benefitting too; but Copilot remains flat
While the most generative AI market is captured by remains fragmented, DeepSeek holds around 4 percent of total traffic. Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s Grok has bumped up to 2.9 percent, which shows gradual adoption but there’s no breakout moment so far. Claude and Perplexity each hold somewhere about 2 percent traffic. Microsoft Copilot, despite deep integration into Windows and Office products, remains flat at 1.2 percent. Similarweb’s data suggests that distribution alone may not be enough to drive sustained engagement without clear differentiation.
One interesting trend in the report is that overall daily visits across all AI tools have dipped slightly. The data, dated December 25, 2025, highlights a market that is maturing faster than expected. ChatGPT is still the default choice for many, but Gemini’s rapid rise shows that quality improvements, especially in visual AI, can quickly reshape user behavior.
