Google’s Gemini has surged to close the gap in the generative AI market, more than doubling its share of web traffic to 12.9% and chipping away at ChatGPT’s longstanding dominance, new data from SimilarWeb and several independent analyses suggest.
Gemini’s Rapid Growth
In the last 12 months, Gemini has increased its share of global generative AI traffic from 6.4% to 12.9%, one of the most rapid growths among major AI platforms. In the same period, ChatGPT’s own share has plummeted to 74.1% from its peak at 87.1% — making it their biggest ever annual drop in market share since launching the product too!
This surge has been driven by recent AI integrations across Search, Android and Workspace, integrating Gemini into tools millions are already using every day. Analysts describe the trend as the clearest sign yet that the generative AI market is starting to diversify after years in which it was dominated by OpenAI.
Viral Milestones and Cultural Momentum
Some of Gemini’s growth is from viral success at just the right time. The large with the September release of their “Nano Banana” image-editing model — called Gemini 2.5 Flash Image — which got them a huge amount of online engagement and lifted the app to number one in the U.S. App Store, overtaking ChatGPT for the first time.
Gemini’s user downloads climbed 45% in month over month to reach with 12.6m in September, said Apptopia. While it’s not the full picture behind ChatGPT’s downfall, I hope to have shown that it certainly intensified competition.
ChatGPT’s Performance and Emerging Rivals
ChatGPT from OpenAI maintains its dominance position in the market with a very wide margin, and it has about three out of four overall generative AI traffic. But the usage metrics suggest declining engagement — the average time spent per user in the U.S. has fallen 22.5 percent since July 2025, for example, and session frequency is on a downward trend, too.
Alternatively, new entrants like the ~2% traffic share of Perplexity and Anthropic’s Claude are starting to carve their own niches in AI search and business productivity. Microsoft Copilot claims some 14% of global AI assistant market share and the ecosystem is going multipolar.
The Shifting AI Landscape
Industry analysts speculate this diversification is due to product specialization. Gemini is focused on multimodal integration (integrating text, images and voice inputs in an integrated manner), while ChatGPT has a focus on reasoning depth and plugin ecosystems. Perplexity, meanwhile, has already developed a devoted following by the transparency of its retrieval-and-citation method.
Analysts predict that the next war will be in the form of “embedded, contextual assistants” built into productivity environments and cars and devices that completely change how users use AI all day.
Outlook
Despite Gemini’s rise, OpenAI still at the forefront with model updates and premium. But by virtue of existing within Google’s ecosystem, Gemini has something no other standalone platform does: a goldmine of strategic distribution. If Gemini continues growing at its current pace, it could own more than 20% of the market by the middle of 2026 cooking the goose on ChatGPT’s near-monopoly era in generative AI.