Despite rival gains, ChatGPT maintains overwhelming market dominance in AI chatbot traffic

New research from Graphite indicates that ChatGPT continues to hold a commanding lead in the AI chatbot sector, capturing over 81% of worldwide traffic to major AI services, while no competitor has reached the 10% threshold. While rivals like Google's Gemini and Anthropic's Claude have shown significant growth—with Claude recording extraordinary growth over the past year and Gemini expanding quickly—this momentum has not been enough to challenge OpenAI's position. Graphite's analysis, which utilized Similarweb data, shows that after a plateau for seven months, ChatGPT usage resumed growth this year, hitting a record 61.35 billion monthly visits in September. Furthermore, the data reveals that AI services are increasingly influencing traditional web traffic; worldwide referral traffic from AI services rose by 92% over the last year, with ChatGPT driving 60% of those visits. Globally, monthly visits to major AI services reached 76 billion, a 37% increase from the previous year, though the US accounts for only 8.8% of this global AI activity.