ChatGPT is still the biggest name in consumer AI, but the numbers now tell a less comfortable story for OpenAI: its share of the AI assistant market has fallen below 50% for the first time, even as total usage keeps climbing. Google Gemini and Anthropic Claude are taking slices of a fast-growing pie, and ChatGPT now has 46.4% of the market, according to Sensor Tower data cited by TechCrunch.
Gemini reached 27.7%, while Claude climbed to 10.3%. The rest – including Grok, Perplexity, DeepSeek, and Meta AI – are still playing for scraps, with none above 5%.
ChatGPT still leads on scale
OpenAI’s product remains the volume king. ChatGPT reached 1.1 billion monthly users after becoming the fastest app in history to hit 1 billion. That sounds dominant because it is. But dominance and monopoly are not the same thing, and the latest share shift suggests the market is finally behaving like a market.
Gemini’s rise is helped by Google’s ecosystem gravity, while Claude has carved out a reputation as a serious work tool. That combination matters because users are no longer choosing assistants only on feature lists; brand trust and perceived alignment with personal values are starting to weigh more heavily too.
- ChatGPT monthly users: 1.1 billion
- Google Gemini monthly users: 662 million
- Anthropic Claude monthly users: 245 million
Asia drives volume, the US drives spending
The growth story is not evenly distributed. Sensor Tower expects AI assistant downloads to reach 2.3 billion in the first half of 2026, while spending will rise to $4.2 billion from $1.8 billion in the first half of 2025. That is a lot of app-store momentum, but also a sign that the category is moving from novelty to paid utility.
Asia still leads North America on downloads, but it is also where the first quarterly decline appeared: downloads in the region fell 3.3% in the first quarter, dragged down by China and India. The US, by contrast, looks like the higher-value market, where people use AI assistants for work and are more willing to pay for premium features.
Anthropic appears to benefit from that pattern. It has the best subscription conversion rate in the sector, with 13% of users paying for its service. That is a healthier signal than raw download growth, because app stores do not pay the bills.
Ads, shopping, and the new AI distribution fight
OpenAI is also testing how far it can push monetization without wrecking the product. It began experimenting with ads in ChatGPT in February, then gradually expanded both ad load and the share of users who see them. By May, 17% of daily active users were seeing ads on average.
The early advertiser mix is familiar: software and retail lead, followed by media and entertainment, then food and restaurants. ChatGPT is already sending referral traffic to Target, Walmart, and Costco, which is exactly the kind of commerce flow platforms want to capture before someone else does.
Amazon, however, chose the less cooperative route by blocking ChatGPT crawlers, and its traffic from AI assistants has since stalled. That has helped push retailers toward their own assistants instead. Amazon Rufus is showing stronger conversion with users than without it, while Walmart’s Spark is growing fast. The message is pretty simple: if AI is becoming a shopping layer, retailers would rather own the layer than rent it from OpenAI.
The next test is whether ChatGPT can stay the default while losing share, or whether the market keeps fragmenting as Gemini, Claude, and retailer-owned assistants get better at pulling users into their own ecosystems. Right now, the answer looks less like ”winner takes all” and more like ”winner pays for everything.”