Earlier this year, ChatGPT's dominance of the AI chatbot market looked like it was slipping, as Google's Gemini and Anthropic's Claude gained momentum and analysts talked about a genuine multi-polar race. New research published Monday suggests the opposite has happened: ChatGPT now accounts for more than 81% of worldwide traffic to major AI chatbots, and no competitor has managed to capture even 10%, according to a study from research and growth marketing firm Graphite.
Business Insider and Forbes both reported on the findings, which challenge the narrative that OpenAI's lead has peaked. For more context on this story, see our ongoing AI industry coverage.
The Numbers Behind the Rebound
After surging through the first half of 2025, ChatGPT usage largely plateaued for seven months, feeding speculation that the chatbot market had matured and that rivals were peeling away users. According to Graphite's analysis, that pause is over. Monthly visits to ChatGPT climbed nearly 20% to a record 61.35 billion in September.
The rebound aligns with Business Insider's own reporting last week, when the outlet cited figures showing ChatGPT now has 1.2 billion weekly users. Across the industry, monthly visits to major AI services reached 76 billion worldwide, up 37% from a year earlier — evidence that the overall pie is still growing rapidly even as ChatGPT tightens its grip on most of it.
How the Study Was Compiled
Graphite, led by CEO Ethan Smith, analyzed web and app traffic to and from major AI services using data from Similarweb, the analytics firm whose traffic estimates underpin much of the digital media industry. The study covered both visits to chatbot products and the referral traffic those products send back out to the wider web.
Traffic share is not the same as user share, and Similarweb estimates carry well-known limitations — they approximate rather than measure, and companies rarely publish their own comparable numbers. But even with those caveats, the direction of the data is unambiguous: ChatGPT is not just holding its lead, it is extending it.
Rivals Are Growing — From Much Smaller Bases
The research is not a story of stagnation at ChatGPT's competitors. Claude recorded what the study describes as extraordinary growth over the past year, and Gemini expanded quickly as well, buoyed by deep integration into Google's search product and Android devices. Other challengers have grown too, though from even smaller starting points.
The problem for each of them is the starting line. Because ChatGPT entered the market first and captured the default position in consumers' minds, even dramatic percentage growth at the rivals has left every one of them below the 10% traffic threshold. A service doubling its audience can still be small in absolute terms when it begins from a fraction of the incumbent's base. In market terms, ChatGPT's 81% share is closer to Google's position in search than to any conventional competitive race.
Chatbots Are Sending Traffic Out, Too
The study also tracks the other side of the equation: where all those chatbot users go next. Worldwide referral traffic from AI services jumped 92% over the past year, and ChatGPT was responsible for 60% of those outbound visits, according to Graphite. For publishers and e-commerce sites, that makes ChatGPT the single most influential AI referral source — a dynamic that is reshaping SEO strategies built around traditional search crawlers.
It also means the competitive stakes now extend well beyond the chatbots themselves. Whoever controls the front door of AI-mediated browsing effectively controls which merchants, publishers and services get discovered at all, a gatekeeping role Google has held for two decades through traditional search.
Google Is Running a Different Play
Google's response to chatbot competition is visible inside search itself. The study notes that Google's AI Overviews now appear in 62% of US searches, providing AI-generated answers directly on the results page. Google's AI Mode, which enables more conversational interactions with Search, attracted 491 million US web visits in August, a rapid ramp for a product that launched to limited availability.
In other words, Google is less trying to win the standalone chatbot traffic war than to keep users inside its own AI-augmented search experience — a strategy that shows up differently in traffic statistics but may matter more commercially.
The Boom Is Global
Perhaps the most striking figure in the study is geographic. The United States accounts for just 8.8% of worldwide AI traffic, meaning more than 90% of chatbot usage happens elsewhere. The AI boom, whatever else it is, is not an American consumer phenomenon — it is a global one, with growth concentrated in markets where cheap or free chatbot access is often the first touchpoint with generative AI.
For OpenAI's rivals, the message of the data is sobering: the market is expanding fast enough to support large absolute growth for everyone, but ChatGPT's dominance is not eroding — it is compounding.
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