ChatGPT is simply the name you think of when AI is brought up. It’s seen as the figurehead of the latest tech revolution, with more than 900 million weekly active users, it continues to lead the way.
However, the tide is turning faster than ever; a dramatic drop in market share across 2025 has accelerated into 2026, with mobile app data showing ChatGPT’s share falling below 50% for the first time.
There have been significant shifts in 2026 too, such as the news that OpenAI has closed Sora, its video generation app, alongside intensifying competition from Gemini, Grok, and Claude.
That’s bound to have an adverse effect on usage stats when you consider how many were using Sora/ChatGPT for video generation.
ChatGPT is still leading the pack in total usage, but its grasp on the top is slipping fast – and rivals are now growing at a much faster rate.
The Standout ChatGPT Usage Stats April 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 5.35 Billion Monthly Visits (February 2026)
- ChatGPT has a 60–65% Web Traffic Market Share (down from 87% a year ago)
- ChatGPT’s mobile app market share has fallen to 45.3% (down from 69.1% in January 2025)
- OpenAI now has 50 million paying subscribers
OpenAI continues to lose market share in GenAI website traffic, while $GOOGL 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 agoAt this point in the race its all about distribution &… pic.twitter.com/bkg5guE24x
— Rihard Jarc (@RihardJarc) April 16, 2026
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. The announcement came alongside OpenAI’s disclosure of a massive $110 billion funding round backed by Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank.
OpenAI also revealed it now has 50 million paying subscribers across all tiers, with the company noting that January and February 2026 were on track to be their biggest-ever months for new subscriber signups.
That 900 million figure is massive – for context, Google recently posted a blog showing that Gemini gets 750 million users a month. While Gemini is closing the gap rapidly, ChatGPT’s weekly figure still dwarfs it.
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 |
| 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 |
The traffic picture is more nuanced than it first appears. While visits dipped in December 2025 (likely due to the festive lull), January 2026 saw a rebound to around 5.5–5.7 billion, before February settled at roughly 5.2–5.35 billion. Semrush notes that the February dip aligns with typical seasonal patterns – it’s a shorter month with fewer working days.
For additional context, the platform handles an estimated 2.5 billion prompts per day and users send around 18 billion messages per week.
Global Website Ranking
Semrush has a ranking of all the most visited websites in the world, and ChatGPT currently sits in 5th place. Separately, Cloudflare Radar ranks chatgpt.com as the #10 global domain – and the only AI domain in the top 20.
- Google: 95 billion monthly visits
- YouTube: 47 billion monthly visits
- Facebook: 9.2 billion monthly visits
- Instagram: 5.7 billion monthly visits
- ChatGPT: 5.2–5.7 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 (February 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.
When you compare this table with the one displayed by Resourcera (which looked at ChatGPT users in September 2025), you notice another pattern.
Users in the two youngest groups have dropped from 24.26% to 23.09% and 30.23% to 28.86%.
While they still make up the two highest user groups, all the older groups saw a decent increase. Notably, users aged 18-24 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: 53.15%
- Female: 46.85%
This is a notable shift from launch, when roughly 80% of users were male. Some analyses now 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. Interestingly, India 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.
The study claims that’s 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 (March 2026) 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 appears to be shifting 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.
Web Traffic Market Share
In January 2025, OpenAI and ChatGPT boasted an 86.7% web traffic market share. By January 2026, Similarweb data showed this had fallen to around 64.5% – a staggering 22-point drop in just twelve months. A more recent BestBrokers study from March 2026 puts the figure even lower at 60.4%.
Trending Topics noted that ChatGPT saw a 15% drop in market share within the last six months of 2025 alone.
Here’s a closer look at the current web traffic market share statistics:
| AI Platforms | Web Traffic Market Share |
| ChatGPT | 60–65% |
| Gemini | 18–22% |
| DeepSeek | 3.7% |
| Grok | 3.4% |
| Perplexity | 2.0% |
| Claude | 2.0% |
| Copilot | 1.1% |
The most dramatic shift here is Gemini, which surged from around 5.4% to over 21% in twelve months – nearly quadrupling its share. Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai announced in early 2026 that Gemini had surpassed 750 million monthly active users and 2 billion monthly web visits for the first time.
Mobile App Market Share – The Sharper Story
While web traffic data shows a significant shift, the mobile app data tells an even more dramatic story.
According to Apptopia data reported by Fortune and Big Technology, ChatGPT’s U.S. mobile app market share among daily users fell from 69.1% in January 2025 to just 45.3% in January 2026 – a 24-point plunge that took it below the 50% mark for the first time.
| AI Platform (Mobile App) | Jan 2025 | Jan 2026 |
| ChatGPT | 69.1% | 45.3% |
| Gemini | 14.7% | 25.2% |
| Grok | 1.6% | 15.2% |
Grok’s explosive growth is the surprise of the year – jumping from 1.6% to 15.2%, largely driven by its deep integration within the X (formerly Twitter) app.
The overall chatbot app market grew 152% year-on-year, meaning ChatGPT isn’t necessarily shrinking in absolute terms – it’s losing ground in a category that keeps getting much bigger.
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, Claude leads in average time spent per daily active user at 34.7 minutes in January 2026. Microsoft Copilot came second at 27.2 minutes, with ChatGPT and others trailing.
Referral Traffic from AI Platforms
Looking back at the report from Semrush, we can see how different AI platforms direct traffic to websites.
In the last 6 months of 2025, ChatGPT sent 4 billion users to websites from its platform – in comparison, Gemini was second with 7 million.
In the last month alone, we can see just how big a market share ChatGPT has when it comes to traffic from AI platforms:
| AI Platform | Share of Total Traffic from AI Platforms |
| ChatGPT | 82.17% |
| Other | 17.597% |
| Gemini | 0.144% |
| Grok | 0.022% |
| Perplexity | 0.021% |
| Claude | 0.021% |
Essentially, this means that 82.17% of traffic from all AI platforms originates from ChatGPT. It’s arguably the most important statistic from an SEO perspective, as it demonstrates the need to optimise websites for ChatGPT specifically, rather than focusing on all AI platforms.
However, a Semrush study from April 2026 notes that ChatGPT only enables its web search feature on 34.5% of queries – down from 46% in late 2024 – meaning most responses still rely on training data alone. This suggests there is significant room for growth in AI-driven referral traffic as search functionality expands.
OpenAI Revenue & Subscriber Growth
A few additional business stats worth noting:
- OpenAI’s annualised revenue crossed $25 billion by the end of February 2026, up from $20 billion in 2025.
- 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, with over 7 million enterprise workplace seats deployed.
- ChatGPT was the most downloaded app of 2025 with 770 million installs, surpassing TikTok and Instagram.
- OpenAI’s valuation has risen to around $730 billion following its latest funding round.
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.
However, the market share story paints a very different picture from the raw user numbers.
ChatGPT’s web traffic share has fallen from 87% to around 60–65% in just twelve months. Its mobile app share has plummeted from 69% to 45%. Every major competitor – Gemini, Grok, Claude, DeepSeek – is growing faster in percentage terms.
The question is no longer whether competitors can challenge ChatGPT. They already are. The question is whether ChatGPT’s market share will stabilise or continue to erode.
The competitive pressure has become so acute that OpenAI CEO 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 and a lower-priced $8 ChatGPT Go plan.
Could this be the beginning of the end for OpenAI’s dominance in this field? 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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