ChatGPT Loses Web-Traffic Share as Google Gemini Nears One-Third of Visits

Similarweb’s May 2026 site-by-site snapshot shows ChatGPT’s share of direct browser visits fell from 77.6% to 53.7% year-on-year, while Google Gemini rose to 26.7% and Anthropic’s Claude to nearly 8%; the figures exclude API and app usage.

ChatGPT has lost a substantial share of measured web traffic over the past year while Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude made notable gains, according to Similarweb’s site-by-site traffic snapshot released in May 2026. The shift marks a rebalancing in where users first try large language model chat interfaces on the open web and could change discovery and referral flows for developers and product teams.

In the 12 — month view cited by Similarweb, ChatGPT’s share of browser visits fell from 77.6% to 53.7%. Google Gemini expanded from 7.3% to 26.7%, and Anthropic’s Claude climbed from about 1.4% to nearly 8%. Month — to-month detail placed ChatGPT near 75% in May 2025 and roughly 50% by April 2026, while Gemini’s share accelerated to roughly 30% since the turn of the year.

Those percentages represent only direct browser visits to vendor sites. The underlying metrics exclude API calls, embedded widgets, desktop and mobile apps, and other channels where usage can be high but is not captured in web-traffic panels. That distinction matters because several vendors — particularly OpenAI and Anthropic — derive substantial engagement and revenue from APIs, developer tools and non-web clients.

For builders and product teams, the divergence between web visibility and backend usage is a practical signal: rising web share for Gemini indicates improved discovery and landing — page traffic, but does not necessarily translate to parity in developer adoption or production API volume. Teams should track both web referrals and backend metrics (API calls, SDK adoption, app installs) when evaluating platform reach and prioritizing integrations.

Smaller players showed mixed outcomes in the web panel: Deepseek edged down from about 6% to around 4%, Grok remained near 3%, and both Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity stayed below 2% of measured web visits. Because Similarweb’s dataset is web-centric, lower site shares do not by themselves measure total developer or enterprise footprint. actually build and pay.