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%.

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.

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.

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.