ChatGPT’s commanding lead in the chatbot market is shrinking as competitors gain momentum. OpenAI’s flagship product saw its market share among daily U.S. mobile app users fall from 69.1% to 45.3% between January 2025 and January 2026.
Alex Kantrowitz reports for Big Technology, citing data from mobile insights firm Apptopia. During the same period, Google’s Gemini surged from 14.7% to 25.1% market share, while Grok climbed from 1.6% to 15.2%.
The overall chatbot market expanded by 152% since last January, indicating that ChatGPT continues to grow even as rivals capture larger portions of the expanding pie. Web analytics firm Similarweb confirms this pattern. ChatGPT visits increased 50% from 3.8 billion to 5.7 billion, while Gemini visits exploded 647% from 267.7 million to 2 billion.
David Carr, insights news and research editor at Similarweb, notes that ChatGPT experienced a traffic dip in November and December coinciding with Gemini’s growth spurt. Preliminary January data shows ChatGPT recovering but not reaching its October peak of over 6 billion visits.
The market shows signs of maturation. “The market is flattening a bit,” says Apptopia director Adam Blacker. “We likely have not hit peak GenAI apps, but this is an early inflection point.”
The competition is not purely zero-sum. Twenty percent of chatbot users employed at least two apps by late 2025, up from 5% in 2023. Anthropic’s Claude demonstrates that engagement matters beyond user numbers, with daily usage time tripling from ten minutes to over thirty minutes between June 2025 and today.
