Developed by xAI, Grok was announced in 2023 as an AI chatbot for Premium users on the social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter).
Since then, the platform has expanded to include various other uses – including an app and web page where people can call upon this LLM to perform countless tasks or solve various queries.
Despite being one of the newest entrants to the AI space, it has quickly found its way into discussions with other elite platforms, such as ChatGPT and Gemini.
In fact, Grok has been one of the fastest-growing AI chatbots in the world in percentage terms – though 2026 has brought explosive growth and explosive controversy in equal measure. The deepfake scandal that erupted in late December 2025 led to country-level bans, lawsuits, and Apple privately threatening to remove the Grok app from its App Store in January. That story has since partially resolved – Apple approved Grok’s latest update after xAI added more guardrails – but the scars remain.
Meanwhile, the blockbuster merger between xAI and SpaceX in February 2026, valued at a combined $1.25 trillion, has fundamentally changed the corporate picture behind Grok. And in a genuinely surprising twist, xAI has now signed an agreement to sell compute on its Colossus 1 supercluster to Anthropic – its most direct AI model rival.
The April Apptopia data also delivered the first warning sign: after fourteen straight months of growth, Grok’s U.S. mobile app share dipped for the first time in March. It’s a small dip, but it raises the question of whether the meteoric rise has hit its first plateau.
Now, let’s get onto some of the key Grok AI usage stats for 2026:
Grok AI Usage Stats – The Key Notes
- 50–64 million monthly active users (estimates vary by source)
- 8–10 million daily active users
- 326.3 million website visits in March 2026 – the platform’s highest ever
- 13.5% U.S. mobile app DAU share (March 2026), down from a 15.3% peak in February
- ~6% global web traffic share, up from less than 1.5% a year ago
- Close to 100 million mobile app downloads
- 120 minutes/day spent in-app by power users (up from <14 minutes per general user a few months ago)
- xAI valued at $250 billion as part of the $1.25 trillion SpaceX merger
Gen AI traffic share update
Main takeaways:
→ Claude and Gemini continue to grow.
→ ChatGPT moves closer to the 50% mark.🗓️ 12 months ago:
ChatGPT: 77.6%
Gemini: 7.27%
DeepSeek: 6.01%
Grok: 3.17%
Perplexity: 1.75%
Copilot: 1.56%
Claude: 1.37%🗓️ 6 months ago:… pic.twitter.com/89kaKgUzqC
— Similarweb (@Similarweb) May 14, 2026
Grok AI – How Many People Use The Platform?
How many people use Grok AI every day or month?
Grok itself doesn’t publish these figures, so you have to look elsewhere to find them — and the estimates vary significantly depending on the source.
Keep in mind that usage stats include a combination of people using the chatbot on X, the web page, and the mobile application.
The most widely cited figure comes from xAI’s own internal reporting: 64 million monthly active users as of late 2025, according to Business of Apps. This represents a staggering jump from mid-2025, when MAU sat at around 35 million – and an almost incomprehensible 1,400x leap from December 2024, when Grok reportedly had just 44,800 monthly active users.
Other estimates are more conservative. SEOProfy reports around 60 million MAU for the Grok app in January 2026, while DemandSage cites a lower figure of around 30 million unique visitors based on Semrush data. The discrepancy largely comes down to methodology — whether you’re counting unique web visitors, app users, or people interacting with Grok within the X app itself.
When it comes to how many people use Grok daily, estimates point to around 8 to 10 million DAU, giving a DAU/MAU ratio of around 25–30%, which indicates moderate but consistent engagement.
While these numbers are impressive — especially given the platform’s youth — they still sit far behind the leaders. Here’s how Grok stacks up:
| AI Platforms | Estimated Monthly Active Users |
| ChatGPT | 900 million+ (weekly) |
| Gemini | 750 million |
| Grok | 50–64 million |
| DeepSeek | ~40 million |
| Perplexity | ~34 million |
| Claude | ~30–40 million (rising fast) |
As with Google and Gemini, Grok is able to leverage the existing userbase of X/Twitter (roughly 400–600 million monthly users) to funnel traffic and users towards its AI offering. Every X Premium subscriber gets Grok access by default, giving it distribution that no other AI chatbot can match outside of Google’s ecosystem.
Grok’s Web Traffic Stats
It’s always worth looking at the web traffic stats for AI platforms, as this gives insights into how many people visit it, where they’re coming from, etc. With Grok AI, we can use Similarweb and Semrush data to reveal some interesting statistics:
- March 2026 saw Grok.com reach 326.3 million visits – its highest recorded total ever, up 9.3% month-on-month and 61% year-on-year
- February 2026 dipped to 298.6 million visits before March rebounded
- January 2026 came in at 314 million visits
- Users spend an average of 12 minutes 57 seconds on the website
- An average of 21.41 pages viewed per visit
- A low bounce rate of 26.48%, indicating users are staying and engaging
- ~73% of web traffic comes from desktop devices
- The United States has the highest traffic share for Grok
- Grok.com ranks 4th in the AI Chatbots and Tools category on Similarweb (behind ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude as of March 2026)
The traffic growth has been remarkable. For context, Grok.com was attracting around 140–150 million visits per month as recently as August 2025. By November 2025, that had risen to 234 million; by January, 314 million; and by March, 326 million. That’s more than doubling in seven months, though the curve is clearly flattening.
We can also take a closer look at the web traffic share across different countries:
| Country | Traffic Share (Feb 2026) |
| USA | 23.68% |
| India | 8.00% |
| Brazil | 5.21% |
| South Korea | 3.56% |
| Hong Kong | 3.13% |
The US share of 23–24% is higher than ChatGPT’s (~15–16%) or Gemini’s (~17%), reflecting Grok’s stronger domestic positioning thanks to X’s core American user base. India’s large share reflects the country’s huge and growing tech-savvy population.
One of the most interesting aspects of Grok AI’s website analysis is that 90.63% of all outbound links from the site point to x.ai. This is basically the home of Grok and gives you a chance to look at other xAI products. To add some context behind that, OpenAI only has a 10.48% share of ChatGPT’s outbound links.
It may initially appear surprising that 60.22% of social traffic comes from YouTube – X sits in second with 14.56%, but this can be explained as users on X are less likely to visit Grok.com, as they can use the chatbot on the X platform itself.
Grok AI Demographic Stats – Who Uses Grok The Most?
Of all the AI platforms, Grok skews the most heavily towards male users. Similarweb’s February 2026 data puts the web traffic gender split at:
- 67.46% male users
- 32.54% female users
This is significantly more male-skewed than any other leading AI platform. For comparison, ChatGPT is around 53% male and Gemini sits at a similar ratio. Sensor Tower data goes even further, estimating Grok’s male user share at around 82.5% when looking at the app specifically.
As the brainchild of the controversial Elon Musk, Grok has gained fame and fandom among young males more than most – which is also reflected in the stats based on age groups.
Around 50–51% of all Grok users are under the age of 35, with the largest single group being 25–34 year olds. Here’s the breakdown:
| Age Groups | Percentage of Grok Users |
| 18-24 | 19.40% |
| 25-34 | 31.47% |
| 35-44 | ~16% |
| 45-54 | ~14% |
| 55-64 | ~11% |
Sensor Tower data adds an interesting demographic layer: Grok’s top user personas include crypto traders, gamblers, and peer-to-peer payment users — reflecting the platform’s overlap with X’s power-user base.
Grok AI Market Share & Growth — The Story Just Got More Interesting
Grok’s market share story in 2026 is one of two very different pictures depending on whether you look at global web traffic or U.S. mobile app data — and the mobile picture flipped in March.
Global Web Traffic Market Share
Across early 2026, Grok’s share of total generative AI web traffic climbed steadily from under 1.5% to around 6% by March, putting it roughly level with Claude and ahead of Perplexity. It’s an enormous jump from where the platform was twelve months ago.
| AI Platforms | Global Web Traffic Market Share (March 2026) |
| ChatGPT | 56.7% |
| Gemini | 25.5% |
| Grok | ~6% |
| Claude | ~6% |
| DeepSeek | 3.7% |
| Perplexity | 2.0% |
| Copilot | 1.1% |
Source: Similarweb data via Trending Topics and investor Rihard Jarc’s April 2026 analysis.
The bigger story here is what’s happening to ChatGPT, not Grok – OpenAI’s flagship has shed nearly 30 percentage points of share in fourteen months, and that share is being absorbed almost entirely by Gemini, with Grok and Claude picking up the rest.
U.S. Mobile App Market Share — The First Plateau
The mobile app picture tells a more nuanced story than it did a month ago. According to Apptopia’s April 2026 data brief, Grok’s U.S. chatbot mobile app market share slipped from 15.3% in February to 13.5% in March – its first monthly decline after fourteen straight months of growth. Downloads fell 13%, and churn ticked up.
| AI Platform (U.S. Mobile) | Jan 2025 | Feb 2026 (peak) | March 2026 |
| ChatGPT | 69.1% | ~42% | 38.7% |
| Gemini | 14.7% | ~25% | ~25% |
| Grok | 1.6% | 15.3% | 13.5% |
| Claude | <2% | 4.0% | 10.0% |
| Copilot | – | ~10% | ~10% |
Two things changed in March:
- Grok’s growth stalled. After a near-vertical climb from 8% to over 15% between September and February – fuelled by X integration and the Grok 4.20 multi-agent release – downloads fell, churn rose, and DAU share gave back ground for the first time. Apptopia’s VP of Research Tom Grant suggested the deepfake scandal and regulatory pressure in Europe may finally be biting.
- Claude surged into Grok’s former growth slot. Anthropic’s app jumped from 4% to 10% in a single month – a 167% MoM DAU jump – and is now the third-largest chatbot app in the U.S. Claude has effectively taken the “fastest growing” crown that Grok held for most of 2025 and early 2026.
That said – even after the dip, Grok’s position is substantial. For an app that barely existed a year ago, holding 13.5% U.S. share is remarkable, and the platform retains its X-integration distribution advantage.
Engagement: The Quiet Bright Spot
While share has slipped, engagement has actually deepened. Apptopia’s March data shows Grok power users now spend 120 minutes per day in the app, up from under 22 minutes per general DAU just a couple of months earlier. That puts Grok behind Microsoft Copilot (154 minutes) and roughly level with Claude’s power users (139 minutes), but well ahead of where it was on engagement at the start of the year.
In other words: Grok may be acquiring fewer new users than it was in February, but the ones it has are spending more time in the app than ever. Whether that depth of engagement converts to paid subscriptions is the next thing to watch.
The xAI / SpaceX Merger & Funding
The corporate landscape behind Grok changed dramatically in early 2026. On February 2, 2026, Elon Musk merged xAI with SpaceX in a deal valuing the combined entity at $1.25 trillion — with SpaceX at $1 trillion and xAI at $250 billion.
The merger, structured as an all-stock acquisition with xAI becoming a wholly owned SpaceX subsidiary, is the largest corporate merger of all time. Musk cited the need to build “orbital data centres” as the main rationale.
Key financial facts about xAI/Grok:
- xAI was valued at $230 billion in its January 2026 Series E round ($20 billion raised), then $250 billion as part of the SpaceX merger announced two weeks later
- Total funding raised by xAI exceeds $45 billion across all rounds
- Grok generated an estimated $350 million in revenue in 2025
- Revenue is projected to reach $2 billion in 2026 through subscriptions (SuperGrok at $30/month, SuperGrok Heavy at $300/month), enterprise deals, and government contracts
- xAI secured a $200 million U.S. Department of Defense contract in July 2025
- SpaceX is expected to IPO in mid-2026, with recent reporting suggesting a $75 billion raise
However, the merger has brought complications. Following the SpaceX acquisition, xAI underwent significant restructuring — half of the company’s co-founders left, and by late March 2026, Musk was the only remaining co-founder. The CFO also departed in April 2026, replaced by a SpaceX executive.
The Anthropic–Colossus Twist
In one of the more unexpected developments of the year, xAI has now signed an agreement with Anthropic to provide access to Colossus 1, its first-generation supercomputer. xAI selling compute to the maker of Claude – the model whose mobile app surge just edged Grok off its growth trajectory – is a striking reversal of the usual competitive dynamic, and underlines just how scarce GPU capacity at frontier scale has become. With Colossus 2 coming online (more on that below), xAI has spare capacity in Colossus 1 to monetise, and Anthropic is one of the few buyers that can absorb infrastructure at that scale.
The Deepfake Scandal — Where Things Stand Now
No discussion of Grok in 2026 can avoid the elephant in the room: the deepfake crisis that engulfed the platform from late December 2025 into early 2026. The full extent of Apple’s response only became public in mid-April when NBC News obtained a letter Apple sent to U.S. senators.
When Grok’s image generation capabilities launched on X in December 2025, users quickly discovered ways to generate sexually explicit and non-consensual images, despite nudity being nominally banned. The situation escalated rapidly:
- A New York Times review found Grok generated 4.4 million images over just nine days, with 1.8 million being sexualised depictions of women
- Researchers at the Center for Countering Digital Hate estimated Grok produced over 23,000 sexualised images of children over 11 days
- At the peak, users were generating an estimated 6,700 sexually suggestive images per hour — 84 times the combined output of the top 5 dedicated deepfake websites
The fallout was severe and global:
- Malaysia and Indonesia became the first countries to ban Grok outright (Indonesia later lifted its ban after xAI committed to safety measures)
- The European Commission opened formal proceedings against X under the Digital Services Act
- Ofcom in the UK launched an investigation under the Online Safety Act
- Investigations are active in France, Canada, India, Brazil and Australia
- Multiple lawsuits have been filed, including a class-action on behalf of minors
- Apple privately threatened to remove Grok from the App Store in January and rejected multiple updates between January and March 2026
According to Apple’s April letter to senators, after months of back-and-forth, xAI eventually made enough changes for Apple to approve Grok’s latest update – so the App Store ban threat has been (for now) defused, but only after Apple repeatedly rejected updates and forced major moderation changes. NBC News’ follow-up reporting in April found dozens of AI-generated sexualised images of real people still being posted publicly on X, suggesting the technical safeguards remain imperfect. California’s Attorney General has launched a formal investigation, and U.S. senators continue to apply pressure.
The controversy is a double-edged sword for Grok’s growth stats. Reuters noted at the time that Grok’s U.S. market share jump to 17.8% came amid the sexualised images backlash — raising questions about how much of the growth was driven by the controversy itself drawing attention to the platform. The March decline to 13.5% suggests that effect, if it existed, has now reversed.
Infrastructure and Models: The Compute Arms Race
The story behind Grok in 2026 isn’t really about apps or share – it’s about compute. xAI has built infrastructure that genuinely rivals anything in the industry, and the model roadmap is the most aggressive of any frontier lab.
Colossus 1 and 2
The original Colossus supercluster in Memphis, Tennessee houses around 230,000 GPUs and was, at one point, the largest single-site AI training installation in the world. That title now belongs to its successor.
Colossus 2 is in the final stretch of an upgrade that takes it to 1.5 gigawatts of power and over 550,000 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs – completed in late April 2026. xAI has announced plans to expand further toward 1 million GPUs and 2GW of capacity. Together, the Memphis facilities consume roughly the output of two large nuclear power plants.
Colossus 2 was purpose-built to train Grok 5 and the parallel roadmap behind it. With Colossus 1 freed up for inference and external customers, the deal with Anthropic makes commercial sense even if the optics are strange.
Grok 4.3, 4.20, and the Roadmap to Grok 5
The model lineup has moved fast. Two months ago, the headline was Grok 4.1. As of May 2026:
- Grok 4.20 Beta (Feb 17, 2026) introduced a 4-agent collaboration system (Grok as coordinator, plus Harper, Benjamin, and Lucas as research, logic, and contrarian agents)
- Grok 4.20 Heavy (Feb 18) expanded this to 16 specialised agents with a 2M token context window – still the largest among Western closed models
- Grok 4.20 Beta 2 (March 3) added five targeted fixes covering instruction following, hallucination reduction, LaTeX support, image search accuracy, and multi-image rendering
- Grok 4.3 Beta (April 17) – the current flagship – brings a 1M token context window, native video input (up to five minutes at 1080p), and native PDF/PPTX/XLSX file generation directly from a prompt. API pricing is roughly 40% cheaper on input tokens and 60% cheaper on output tokens versus Grok 4.20
Beyond that, Musk has laid out the most specific roadmap of any frontier lab: Grok 4.4 (1 trillion parameters) within weeks, Grok 4.5 (1.5 trillion parameters) shortly after, and Grok 5 with variants at 6 trillion and 10 trillion parameters. xAI has reportedly seven models in simultaneous training on Colossus 2. Polymarket currently gives Grok 5 about a 33% probability of shipping by June 30, 2026.
Whether all of that ships on schedule is another question entirely – Grok 5’s original Q1 2026 launch window has already slipped – but the velocity is unmatched.
More Information About Grok Users
As well as looking at who uses Grok, we can call upon data from several sources to tell you more about the users on this platform.
Marketing LTB carried out research that revealed a handful of interesting data points:
- Grok has a 42% retention rate after 30 days, indicating that nearly half of users return to the platform
- 65% of new users come from X integrations – an intriguing statistic that backs up an earlier point about social traffic. Most users don’t travel from X to Grok.com because they’re utilising its integrations on the social media platform itself
- 9% of Grok users pay for Premium. For context, only around 1-2% of ChatGPT users pay for its premium version
Information from Fritz.ai also tells us something about Grok’s usage stats. It points out that 61% of Grok users prefer its tone over ChatGPT for informal use.
It also shows a 25% MoM growth in paid users, further emphasising that people want to pay for this tool. On average, paid users with a SuperGrok subscription will send 15–22 prompts per day.
Summing Up Grok AI Usage Stats May 2026
Looking back at all of this data, one common theme keeps appearing: growth — but growth that is now accompanied by serious growing pains and the first signs of a plateau.
Grok has seen unprecedented user growth since it launched in November 2023. Web traffic hit an all-time high of 326 million visits in March, and the platform now sits comfortably as the fourth-largest AI chatbot website globally. Its 13.5% U.S. mobile app share – even after the March dip – puts it ahead of every AI app except ChatGPT and Gemini. The xAI/SpaceX merger at $1.25 trillion speaks to the scale of ambition behind the platform.
But 2026 has also brought existential challenges. The deepfake scandal has resulted in country-level bans, an Apple App Store standoff that came within an inch of removal, lawsuits, and investigations in at least a dozen jurisdictions. The corporate restructuring following the SpaceX merger has seen nearly every co-founder depart. Claude’s surge in March took the “fastest growing” mantle that Grok had owned for over a year. And the question of whether Grok’s rapid user growth was driven by genuine product quality or controversy-fuelled curiosity remains genuinely open.
The Anthropic–Colossus compute deal points to the bigger story underneath all of this: at the frontier of AI, the constraint isn’t users or revenue – it’s gigawatts. xAI has built more of those than nearly anyone else, and if Grok 4.4, 4.5, and 5 ship on schedule, the share data we’re tracking now could look very different by Q3.
Grok is still a long way from Gemini and ChatGPT in absolute user numbers, and its first growth dip has arrived. But it remains one of only four AI assistants operating at meaningful scale globally, with infrastructure that makes it a serious long-term player whatever happens to its month-on-month share.
Check back next month for the latest updates.
Wondering about other notable AI platforms? Check out our other stats roundups for Grok’s competitors here:
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