ChatGPT is simply the name you think of when AI is brought up.
With more than 900 million weekly active users, it continues to lead the way.
The tide, however, is turning; a dramatic drop in market share across 2025 has accelerated into Q2 2026, with the latest Apptopia data showing ChatGPT’s U.S. mobile app share has now fallen below 40% for the first time – a much sharper decline than the “below 50%” story we were reporting just a month ago.
There have been other major shifts, too. OpenAI officially shut down Sora on April 26, 2026, ending its short-lived video generation app.
But, the company also closed a record-breaking $122 billion funding round at an $852 billion post-money valuation on March 31.
However, competition from Claude has gone from a quiet rumble to a genuine surge – Anthropic’s app has gone from under 2% of daily active user share to 10% in the space of three months.
ChatGPT is still leading the pack in total usage, but its grasp on the top is slipping faster than ever – and the competitive set has fundamentally changed.
The Standout ChatGPT Usage Stats May 2026
- 900 Million People Use ChatGPT Actively Every Week
- 83.27% Of Users Will Choose ChatGPT As Their Go-To AI Tool For Personal Tasks
- 70.80% Of Users Pick ChatGPT as Their Primary AI Tool at Work
- ChatGPT Sees ~5.5 Billion Monthly Visits (April 2026)
- ChatGPT has a 56.7% Web Traffic Market Share (down from 77%+ a year ago)
- ChatGPT’s U.S. mobile app DAU share has fallen to 38.7% (down from 69.1% in January 2025)
- OpenAI now has 50 million paying subscribers and 9 million+ paying business users
- OpenAI is generating $2 billion in revenue per month
- OpenAI’s valuation has risen to $852 billion following its $122 billion funding round
ChatGPT User & Traffic Stats
We’ll start with a dip into ChatGPT’s userbase. Specifically, how many users does this platform have – and how much traffic does it draw in each month?
Let’s break it down into two parts: weekly active users and monthly active users.
Weekly Active Users
In February 2026, OpenAI announced that ChatGPT had reached 900 million weekly active users – up from 800 million reported in October 2025, and more than double the 400 million reported in February 2025.
OpenAI also revealed it has 50 million paying subscribers across all tiers, alongside more than 9 million paying business users, a fourfold increase from September 2025. Subscriber momentum reportedly accelerated meaningfully into 2026, with January and February on track to be OpenAI’s biggest-ever months for new subscriber signups.
That 900 million figure is massive, but Gemini is closing the gap rapidly. Google’s most recent figures put the Gemini app at 750 million monthly active users, and analysts at Tech Insider predict Gemini will pass 1 billion MAU by Q3 2026.
Monthly Visits (Web Traffic)
OpenAI doesn’t share monthly active user data publicly, but Semrush and Similarweb have run analyses on ChatGPT’s web traffic over recent months. Here’s how the numbers look:
| Month | Total Visits |
| April 2026 | ~5.5 Billion |
| March 2026 | 5.4–5.6 Billion |
| February 2026 | 5.19–5.35 Billion |
| January 2026 | 5.49–5.72 Billion |
| December 2025 | 5.21 Billion |
| November 2025 | 5.6 Billion |
| October 2025 | 6.01 Billion |
October 2025 remains the all-time peak at around 6 billion visits. February saw a dip aligned with seasonal patterns (shorter month, fewer working days), and traffic has since stabilised around the 5.5 billion mark. ChatGPT also handles an estimated 2.5 billion prompts per day and users send around 18 billion messages per week.
Global Website Ranking
Semrush ranks ChatGPT in 5th place among the world’s most visited websites. Cloudflare Radar separately ranks chatgpt.com as the #10 global domain – and the only AI domain in the top 20. (Worth noting: Similarweb’s own ranking puts it at #71 globally, since each tool weighs traffic differently.)
- Google: 95 billion monthly visits
- YouTube: 47 billion monthly visits
- Facebook: 9.2 billion monthly visits
- Instagram: 5.7 billion monthly visits
- ChatGPT: 5.5 billion monthly visits
- Reddit: 5.2 billion monthly visits
- Wikipedia: 4.2 billion monthly visits
ChatGPT Demographic Statistics – Who Uses It The Most?
Who makes up the majority of ChatGPT’s immense number of users?
Looking at research from Similarweb (April 2026), you’ll see that most ChatGPT users are male between the ages of 25 and 34 – though the gender gap continues to narrow.
Here’s a closer look at the key demographic statistics:
| Age Range | Percentage of ChatGPT Users |
| 18-24 | 23.09% |
| 25-34 | 28.86% |
| 35-44 | 19.12% |
| 45-54 | 14.13% |
| 55-64 | 9.26% |
| 65+ | 5.54% |
There’s nothing overly surprising from that table; it follows the same trend as other AI platforms, with millennials making up the most active users.
One interesting thing you may have deduced is that around a third of ChatGPT users fall into the 34-54 age bracket.
Compared to ChatGPT users in September 2025, you’ll notice the two youngest groups have dropped slightly (18–24 from 24.26% to 23.09%, and 25–34 from 30.23% to 28.86%), while older groups all saw a decent increase. That said, users aged 18-24 still send around half of all messages on the platform, making them the heaviest users despite not being the largest group.
When it comes to the user’s gender, the split continues to narrow:
- Male: 53.08%
- Female: 46.92%
This is a notable shift from launch, when roughly 80% of users were male. Some recent analyses suggest the split may have reached near-parity, with one report claiming around 52% of users are now women.
Finally, we can look at the top countries where ChatGPT is most popular. A BestBrokers study from March 2026 provides updated figures by total users:
| Top Countries | Total Users |
| United States | 205 million |
| India | 198 million |
| Brazil | 69.6 million |
| Canada | 64.8 million |
| France | 51.6 million |
The US continues to dominate in total user numbers, while India is close behind with 198 million users. India has also reached 100 million weekly active users – a milestone in its own right. Canada, despite ranking fourth in total users, leads in engagement – Canadians send around 130 prompts per citizen annually.
ChatGPT Usage – How People Use The Platform
ChatGPT has grown to the point where you can use it for almost anything, but what does the data say about this?
OpenAI published a study in the later stages of 2025 that broke down how much people use the ChatGPT platform on both desktop and mobile.
The headline here is that 73% of ChatGPT usage is non-work-related – an increase of 20% from the year prior.
When you take an even closer look at how people use ChatGPT, the top three are as follows:
- Practical Guidance: 29%
- Writing: 24%
- Seeking Information: 24%
A separate analysis from First Page Sage provides a slightly different breakdown, with general research leading at around 36–37% of usage, followed by academic research at 18%, and coding assistance and email composition both at around 14%.
OpenAI then went a step further to categorise how people interact with ChatGPT based on their intent:
| Intent | Percentage of Users |
| Asking (getting advice or info) | 49% |
| Doing (using ChatGPT to complete tasks) | 40% |
| Expressing (conversing with ChatGPT casually) | 11% |
This is probably one of the most important statistics, particularly when you look at how people approach AI compared with regular search engines.
Nearly half of all users call upon it when asking questions, which has had a profound effect on the SEO industry as we’ve covered many times before.
ChatGPT Usage Popularity – Home vs Work
We’re still talking about how people use ChatGPT, but Exploding Topics conducted a useful survey that demonstrates this AI platform’s popularity against others.
It asked people about their favourite AI tools for both home and work use – and here are the results:
- 83.27% of users choose ChatGPT for personal tasks
- AI mode in Google Search is the second-most-used personal AI tool at 41.13%
- Google Gemini comes in third with 38.38% of users surveyed choosing it
- 70.8% of users will pick ChatGPT for work tasks
- 32.23% of users choose Google’s AI Mode
- 31.28% of users choose Gemini
So, no matter whether you’re using AI for work or personal tasks, ChatGPT dominates as the number one pick by far. However, a growing trend is emerging: one in five AI users now uses multiple apps, according to Apptopia data. The market is fragmenting fast – moving from single-platform dominance toward multi-tool workflows.
ChatGPT Market Share Statistics 2026
ChatGPT retains a majority share of the AI market in 2026 – but the erosion of its lead has become the defining story of the year, and the latest data shows that erosion is accelerating, not slowing.
Web Traffic Market Share
In January 2025, OpenAI and ChatGPT boasted an 86.7% web traffic market share. By March 2026, that figure had fallen to 56.7% according to Similarweb – a staggering 30-point drop in just fourteen months.
Investor Rihard Jarc shared this comparison in mid-April:
OpenAI continues to lose market share in GenAI website traffic, while Gemini and Claude are gaining:
– ChatGPT 56.72% vs 77.43% 12 months ago – Gemini 25.46% vs 6% 12 months ago – Claude 6.02% vs 1.4% 12 months ago
Here’s a closer look at the current web traffic market share statistics:
| AI Platforms | Web Traffic Market Share |
| ChatGPT | ~56.7% |
| Gemini | ~25% |
| Claude | ~6% |
| DeepSeek | 3.7% |
| Grok | 3.4% |
| Perplexity | 2.0% |
| Copilot | 1.1% |
Two shifts stand out here. Gemini has surged from around 5.7% to over 25% in just over a year – more than quadrupling its share – helped by Google’s announcement that the Gemini app had passed 750 million monthly active users and surpassed 2 billion monthly web visits for the first time. And Claude has nearly tripled its web traffic share in a single quarter, going from 2.22% in December 2025 to 6.02% by March 2026.
Mobile App Market Share
If the web traffic data is sobering, the mobile app data is now genuinely alarming for OpenAI.
According to Apptopia’s March 2026 data brief, ChatGPT’s U.S. mobile app DAU share fell to 38.7% in March – the first time it has broken below 40%, and the fourth consecutive month of decline. As recently as September 2025, it held nearly 52%. Crucially, this isn’t just relative share loss – Apptopia notes that ChatGPT’s absolute DAUs have been falling every month since October 2025.
| AI Platform (Mobile App, U.S. DAU Share) | Jan 2025 | Jan 2026 | Mar 2026 |
| ChatGPT | 69.1% | 45.3% | 38.7% |
| Gemini | 14.7% | 25.2% | ~25% |
| Grok | 1.6% | 15.2% | 13.5% |
| Claude | <2% | ~1.5% | 10% |
| Copilot | – | ~10% | ~10% |
The two stories driving this:
- Claude’s step-function moment. Anthropic’s app jumped from under 2% in December to 4% in February to 10% in March – a 167% month-on-month DAU jump in March alone, alongside 7.4 million downloads (nearly triple February’s total, and more than 14x what it was pulling in September). Apptopia’s VP of Research Tom Grant called it “a step function, not a trend line.”
- Grok’s first plateau. After a meteoric run from 8% to 15.3% between September and February, Grok gave back ground in March, slipping to 13.5% with downloads falling 13%. Its deep integration with X drove the initial surge, but the deepfake scandal and regulatory pressure in Europe appear to be biting.
The overall chatbot app market grew 22% from September to March 2026, meaning ChatGPT isn’t shrinking in absolute terms quite as much as the share data suggests – it’s losing ground in a category that keeps getting bigger. But the absolute DAU decline since October is real.
Engagement: Who Keeps Users Longest?
Despite market share losses, ChatGPT retains strong engagement – but interestingly, it doesn’t lead on this metric. According to Apptopia, Microsoft Copilot now leads in time spent per daily active user at 154 minutes for power users. Claude’s power users spend a similar 120+ minutes per day in the app. ChatGPT and others trail.
Referral Traffic from AI Platforms
Looking at referral data from Semrush, ChatGPT still dominates AI-to-web referral traffic by a massive margin:
| AI Platform | Share of Total Traffic from AI Platforms |
| ChatGPT | 82.17% |
| Other | 17.60% |
| Gemini | 0.14% |
| Grok | 0.02% |
| Perplexity | 0.02% |
| Claude | 0.02% |
Essentially, 82% of traffic from all AI platforms originates from ChatGPT. This is arguably the most important statistic from an SEO perspective – it demonstrates the need to optimise websites for ChatGPT specifically, rather than trying to cover every AI platform equally.
However, ChatGPT only enables its web search feature on around 34.5% of queries – down from 46% in late 2024 – meaning most responses still rely on training data alone. There is significant room for growth in AI-driven referral traffic as search functionality expands.
OpenAI Revenue, Funding & Product Stats
A lot has changed on the business side in the last six weeks:
- OpenAI closed its latest funding round at $122 billion in committed capital on March 31, 2026, at a post-money valuation of $852 billion. The round was anchored by Amazon ($50B, with $35B contingent on IPO or AGI), Nvidia ($30B), and SoftBank ($30B), with additional participation from Microsoft, Andreessen Horowitz, T. Rowe Price, ARK Invest, and others. Roughly $3 billion came from individual investors through bank channels – the first time OpenAI extended its round to retail.
- OpenAI is now generating $2 billion in revenue per month. 2025 full-year revenue was approximately $13.1 billion, and the annualised run-rate exceeded $25 billion by the end of February 2026.
- Enterprise revenue is now over 40% of the total (up from around 30% a year ago) and is on track to reach parity with consumer revenue by the end of 2026.
- 9 million paying business users as of February 2026, with over 7 million ChatGPT workplace seats deployed and enterprise seats up roughly 9x year-on-year.
- OpenAI expanded its revolving credit facility to about $4.7 billion, supported by a global syndicate of banks – currently undrawn.
- Codex now serves over 2 million weekly users, up 5x in the past three months, with usage growing more than 70% month over month.
- OpenAI’s APIs now process more than 15 billion tokens per minute.
- ChatGPT mobile app revenue hit $1.35 billion in 2025, a 673% year-over-year increase. In February 2026 alone, ChatGPT recorded $227 million in in-app purchases.
- 92% of Fortune 500 companies now use ChatGPT.
- ChatGPT was the most downloaded app of 2025 with 770 million installs, surpassing TikTok and Instagram.
- OpenAI’s valuation trajectory has been extraordinary: $28B (April 2023) → $86B (Jan 2024) → $157B (Oct 2024) → $300B (Mar 2025) → $500B (Oct 2025) → $852B (April 2026). If OpenAI were public, it would now be the 11th-largest company in the S&P 500.
Sora Officially Shuts Down
The Sora situation we mentioned last month is now official. OpenAI announced the shutdown on March 24, 2026, and the consumer app and web experience was discontinued on April 26. The Sora API will follow on September 24, 2026.
According to a Wall Street Journal investigation, Sora’s worldwide user count peaked at around one million before collapsing to fewer than 500,000, while the app burned through roughly $1 million per day in compute costs. Sam Altman’s decision to kill it freed up compute for what OpenAI is now calling its “AI superapp” – a unified product combining ChatGPT, Codex, and agentic capabilities. Disney, which had committed $1 billion to a Sora partnership, reportedly found out less than an hour before the public announcement.
The First Organised User Backlash
March 2026 also brought something new: the first organised consumer pushback. Over 4 million users globally pledged to boycott ChatGPT following OpenAI’s deal to deploy AI models on a classified US Department of Defense network. Whether this dents the growth curve or remains a rounding error at 900 million weekly users is one of the bigger questions for Q2.
Summarising ChatGPT Usage Stats 2026
In summary, ChatGPT still has astronomical levels of users every week and month, far surpassing any AI platform on the planet. Its 900 million weekly active users is a scale that few technology products in history have achieved.
But the market share story now paints a very different picture from the raw user numbers.
ChatGPT’s web traffic share has fallen from 87% to 56.7% in just fourteen months. Its U.S. mobile app DAU share has plummeted from 69% to 38.7% and is now declining in absolute terms, not just relative ones. Every major competitor – Gemini, Grok, Claude, DeepSeek – is growing faster in percentage terms, and Claude’s March surge in particular looks structural rather than seasonal.
The question is no longer whether competitors can challenge ChatGPT. They already are. The question is whether the slide stabilises somewhere in the mid-50s on web and mid-30s on mobile, or whether it continues all the way down.
The competitive pressure has become so acute that Sam Altman reportedly declared an eight-week “code red” in December 2025, urging employees to refocus on core products. OpenAI has responded with moves like free Codex access, a lower-priced $8 ChatGPT Go plan, and now the consolidation play around the “AI superapp.” Killing Sora was part of the same compute-reallocation logic.
The data suggests we’re heading toward a multi-platform AI market – similar to streaming services – where several major players coexist rather than one tool ruling them all. ChatGPT built the category and still leads it, but the era of near-monopolistic dominance is firmly over.
Check back next month for the latest updates.
What about those competing AI platforms ChatGPT is fending off? We’ve got more stats roundups here:
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