ChatGPT's Market Share Dips Below 50% For First Time As Gemini And Claude Gain Ground

 

 

OpenAI's ChatGPT has lost its majority hold on the global Artificial Intelligence (AI) assistant market, with its share slipping below 50 per cent for the first time since its 2022 launch, according to analytics firm Sensor Tower's State of AI Report for 2026.

ChatGPT transformed AI from a niche concept into a daily tool used by billions worldwide since its arrival roughly three and a half years ago in the industry. However, competition has sharply intensified, with rivals breaking ChatGPT's once-dominant position.

 

According to Sensor Tower, ChatGPT controlled over 50 per cent of the AI assistant market share until January this year. However, by the end of May, that figure had fallen to 46.4 per cent. Despite the decline, ChatGPT remains the most popular AI assistant worldwide, having become the fastest app ever to reach 1 billion monthly users, and now counts over 1.1 billion monthly users.

Gemini follows ChatGPT with 27.7 per cent of the market share and 662 million monthly users, while Claude accounts for 10.3 per cent of the market share with 245 million users. Other AI assistants, including Grok, Perplexity, DeepSeek, and Meta AI, each hold less than 5 per cent of the market.

 

The report also found that previously, most people solely relied on ChatGPT, but now users are increasingly willing to switch between AI assistants. Sensor Tower mentions that brand trust and alignment with user values matter alongside product quality, as OpenAI's deal with the US Department of Defence in February triggered a significant spike in app uninstalls.

The analytics firm noted that Gemini's growth is driven largely by its integration into Google's wider ecosystem of tools, while Claude has built a strong reputation for productivity use cases and is closing in on ChatGPT's user retention rate.

 

Sensor Tower mentions that in the first half of 2026, people downloaded nearly 2.3 billion AI apps and spent over $4.2 billion on them, compared with $1.83 billion in the same period of 2025, indicating a shift from pure growth towards revenue generation.

Notably, 13 per cent of Anthropic's users are paying for a subscription plan, a conversion rate that leads the field. Regionally, Asia recorded its first download decline, of 3.3 per cent, in the first quarter of 2026, driven by dips in China and India. Despite leading globally in total downloads, Asia trails North America and Europe in in-app spending.

 

OpenAI began experimenting with advertising within ChatGPT in February, gradually scaling up the number of ads and the share of users exposed to them, with an average of 17 per cent of daily users being served ads by May.

As ChatGPT deepens its shopping integrations, it is increasingly sending referral traffic to retailers such as Target, Walmart, and Costco. Amazon, which has blocked ChatGPT's web crawlers, has seen stagnant referral traffic as a result.