AI Search Statistics 2026: Chatbot Market Share, Google vs AI, and Local Search Data

Most AI search statistics pages give one number per question. The trackers do not agree with each other, though. ChatGPT’s market share is 38.7% or 80.5% depending on whether you count phone users or clicks sent to websites, and both figures are correct.

This page puts every major measure side by side, dates each one, and links to the live source so you can check the current figure. It also adds something the public trackers cannot: call and traffic data from the businesses we work with.

Five rules for reading any AI search statistic

The percentages on this page will move every month. These five rules are the stable part. Each one explains a group of numbers below, and each will still apply after the next refresh.

AI chatbot market share by assistant

Data period: August 2026 (worldwide), May 2026 (United States and visit counts)  •  Last verified: October 2, 2026

As of August 2026, ChatGPT holds 55.5% of worldwide AI chatbot web traffic, Google Gemini holds 25.6%, and Anthropic’s Claude holds 9.3%, according to Similarweb. DeepSeek (3.4%), Grok (2.4%), Microsoft Copilot (1.6%), and Perplexity (0.9%) are the next four. Similarweb’s basket is slightly wider than these seven, so the figures sum to 98.7%.

Sources: worldwide share from Similarweb, reported by The Decoder. US share, visit counts, and growth from Similarweb data published by Momentic.

Three details sit behind the headline. ChatGPT is not shrinking. Its web visits were flat at about 5.6 billion a month, and OpenAI reported 900 million weekly active users in February 2026. It lost share because the category grew 49% in a year, from 6.96 billion to 10.40 billion monthly visits. Claude is the fastest grower, with visits up 855% year over year to 952.6 million, and it has the lowest bounce rate of the seven at 26%. The US ranking is different. Claude holds 13.4% of US visits against 9.3% worldwide, while Gemini is weaker in the US than abroad.

Why AI market share numbers disagree

Data period: March to September 2026, depending on the tracker  •  Last verified: October 2, 2026

ChatGPT’s reported market share ranges from 38.7% to 80.5% across public trackers in 2026 because each tracker counts something different. App panels count people, traffic panels count website visits, and StatCounter counts clicks sent out to other websites. Every figure in the table below is accurate for what it measures.

The pattern is consistent. On every usage measure, ChatGPT sits between 38.7% and 58.3%, Gemini between a fifth and a quarter, and Claude near a tenth. On every referral measure, ChatGPT is above 75% and Claude is under 2%. Our own analytics match StatCounter far more closely than they match the usage trackers, which is what you would expect: both count clicks that reach a website.

First Page Sage notes that its ChatGPT figure also counts Bing Copilot. Apptopia publishes Gemini and Claude as rounded figures.

LLM market share: consumer use versus enterprise spend

Enterprise LLM market share is a separate ranking with a different leader. Menlo Ventures estimated in December 2025 that Anthropic held 40% of enterprise LLM API spend, OpenAI 27%, Google 21%, and all other providers 12%, based on a survey of about 500 US enterprise decision-makers. Anthropic’s share was 12% in 2023; OpenAI’s was 50%. Menlo Ventures is an investor in Anthropic, which is worth knowing when you read its figures.

So the question “who leads the LLM market” has three honest answers: ChatGPT leads consumer usage, ChatGPT leads referrals by a wider margin, and Anthropic leads enterprise API spend.

How AI chatbot market share has changed

Data period: February 2025 to May 2026, quarterly  •  Last verified: October 2, 2026

ChatGPT’s share of worldwide AI chatbot web visits fell from 76.5% in February 2025 to 53.9% in May 2026, while Gemini rose from 5.6% to 27.9% and Claude from 1.4% to 9.2%, according to Similarweb data published by Momentic.

Claude nearly tripled its share in a single quarter, from 3.4% in February 2026 to 9.2% in May. Since May the movement has slowed. Similarweb’s own tracker put ChatGPT back at 55.5% and Gemini at 25.6% in August. That tracker uses a slightly different basket, so read it as a direction and not as a seventh point on this chart.

AI vs Google: search volume and clicks

Data period: 2025 volume estimates, Q4 2025 share of search, September 2026 referrals  •  Last verified: October 2, 2026

Google processes about 13.7 billion searches per day. ChatGPT processed about 2.5 billion prompts per day as of July 2025, which is 18% of Google’s volume, but only an estimated 66 million to 600 million of those prompts are search-like. That puts ChatGPT’s search activity at roughly 0.5% to 4.4% of Google’s.

Share of search tells the same story from a different angle. SparkToro and Datos tracked where US desktop searches happen across 41 websites in Q4 2025. Google had 73.7%. Every AI tool combined had 3.2%.

Referral traffic is more lopsided still. In September 2026, search engines sent 86.25% of the referral traffic StatCounter measures to US websites, social media sent 13.56%, and AI chatbots sent 0.19% (StatCounter).

The bigger change is happening inside Google

AI has changed search mostly through Google’s own results page, where AI Overviews answer the question before anyone clicks. The zero-click numbers:

• About 68% of US Google searches ended without a click from January to April 2026, per SparkToro. The 32% that did click includes clicks to Google’s own properties and to ads. Its 2024 study with Datos put zero-click searches at about 60%.
• AI Overviews appear on more than 20% of Google searches by Ahrefs data cited by SparkToro, and on more than 40% of US searches by Similarweb.
• Click-through rate (CTR) drops by nearly 60% when an AI Overview is present (Ahrefs, cited by SparkToro).
• Google AI Mode handled 0.34% of searches from January to April 2026 (SparkToro). It is not yet the cause of the click decline.
• About 80% of consumers rely on zero-click results in at least 40% of their searches, and about 60% of searches end without a visit to another site, per Bain & Company (survey of 1,117 consumers, December 2024).

If you want the longer argument on this question, we wrote it up in Is AI replacing Google search?

What AI assistants send to real businesses: our Q3 2026 data

Data period: July 1 to September 30, 2026  •  Last verified: October 2, 2026

Across 4,555 inbound phone calls tracked in CallRail for the businesses Lifted Websites works with, 70.5% came from Google and 1.4% came from AI assistants between July 1 and September 30, 2026. ChatGPT produced 56 of the 62 AI-sourced calls.

Website traffic shows the same scale. Across 14 websites with Google Analytics data, AI assistants referred 3,194 of 900,345 sessions, or 0.35%. The split by business type surprised us. On 11 local service business sites, AI referred 0.88% of sessions (255 of 29,001). On three ecommerce and industrial sites it referred 0.34% (2,939 of 871,344). Individual local sites ranged from 0.3% to 3.1%.

Which assistant sends the traffic

ChatGPT sent 82.8% of the AI-referred sessions in our data, Gemini 12.1%, Claude 1.9%, Copilot 1.4%, and Perplexity 1.2%. Compare that with usage. Gemini has 25.6% of worldwide AI chatbot visits but sent 12.1% of our referrals. Claude has 9.3% of visits and sent 1.9%. The gap holds on US figures too, where Gemini has 19.3% of visits and Claude 13.4%.

One quality signal stood out. 51 of the 62 AI-sourced calls (82%) were first-time callers, against 57% of all calls. A lead from an AI assistant is more likely to be a new customer than a returning one.

AI in local search statistics

Data period: 2026 surveys by BrightLocal and Yext; SOCi index, January 2026  •  Last verified: October 2, 2026

45% of US consumers used ChatGPT or another generative AI tool for local business recommendations in the past year, up from 6% a year earlier, according to BrightLocal‘s 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey of 1,002 adults. Most do not act on the AI answer alone. BrightLocal data on 673 AI users shows that 18% contact the recommended business directly and 75% go to Google to verify first.

The SOCi figures deserve a second look. Its 2026 Local Visibility Index covered more than 350,000 locations across 2,751 multi-location brands and found ChatGPT about 30 times more selective than Google’s local pack. Locations that ChatGPT did recommend averaged a 4.3-star rating. BrightLocal reports that the sources AI most often cites for local businesses are Google Business Profile, Yelp, and Facebook.

For the wider picture on maps, reviews, and mobile, see our local SEO statistics page.

What people use ChatGPT and Claude for

Data period: ChatGPT through mid-2025 (OpenAI); Claude May 2026 (Anthropic Economic Index)  •  Last verified: October 2, 2026

ChatGPT is used mostly for practical guidance (28.3% of messages), writing (28.1%), and seeking information (21.3%), per OpenAI‘s study of consumer use through mid-2025. Claude is used most for content creation (22.7% of conversations), education (13.2%), software development (11.5%), and research (10.9%), per Anthropic‘s May 2026 Economic Index.

For anyone thinking about search, the Claude task data is the interesting part. The two most common work tasks are both information lookups, and the third is recommending products and services (2.3% of conversations). Those are jobs a search engine used to do.

Two cautions. OpenAI and Anthropic use different category schemes and different time periods, so the two charts are not a like-for-like comparison. And the Claude figures describe conversations matched to topics and tasks. They do not describe who the users are or what jobs they hold.

AI usage by state

Data period: May 2026 snapshot, Claude usage only  •  Last verified: October 2, 2026

Washington, D.C. (3.32), California (1.62), New York (1.55), Washington (1.51), and Massachusetts (1.42) have the highest Claude usage relative to working-age population in Anthropic‘s May 2026 Economic Index. West Virginia (0.25) and Mississippi (0.28) have the lowest.

The Anthropic Usage Index is a state’s share of Claude usage divided by its share of the US working-age population. A score of 1.0 means usage is exactly proportional to population. A score of 2.0 means twice as much usage as population alone would predict.

Sixteen states and Washington, D.C. are at or above 1.0. Arizona, where we are based, scores 0.95, level with Texas and just under the national average. New Jersey scores 1.02 and Pennsylvania 0.80. Florida has the highest share of work-related use of any state (47.9% of conversations), and Iowa the highest share of coursework (14.6%).

Read this map with three limits in mind. It measures Claude only, not ChatGPT or Gemini. Places with small populations swing further in either direction, which is part of why D.C. leads by so much. And it is a single snapshot with no trend, so it cannot show which states are rising. It is not evidence about employment or jobs.

What the numbers mean for a marketing budget

The data supports keeping Google as the primary channel and treating AI visibility as a second, smaller channel that is worth measuring now. Three specifics:

1. Keep the ranking work funded. Google produced 70.5% of our tracked calls and AI assistants produced 1.4%. A business that moves its budget from one to the other today is trading a large channel for a small one.
2. Fix what AI reads. AI answers about local businesses lean on Google Business Profile, Yelp, and Facebook, and ChatGPT’s picks average 4.3 stars. Accurate listings and recent reviews serve both channels at once. This is most of what generative engine optimization (GEO) means for a local business.
3. Track AI as its own source. Build a Google Analytics segment for referrals from chatgpt.com, gemini.google.com, perplexity.ai, claude.ai, and copilot.com, and watch calls by source in your call tracking. You cannot manage a channel you have lumped into “direct.”

One more mechanic is worth knowing. Google’s AI Mode breaks a single question into several sub-queries and assembles an answer from the results, a technique Google calls query fan-out. A page that answers the follow-up questions, with each answer able to stand alone, has more chances to earn citations than a page that only targets the head term. We cover how that works for ChatGPT on our ChatGPT SEO page and across engines on our AI SEO services page.

Methodology and sources

Every figure on this page has a named source, a data period, and a link. Where a number came to us through a secondary report, the table says so. Where two sources disagree, both are shown. Use the source links to check the current figure, since most of these trackers publish monthly.

How we collected the first-party data

Calls. All inbound calls from July 1 to September 30, 2026 in two agency CallRail accounts, grouped by the source CallRail assigns. We counted “Google Organic,” “Google Ads,” “Google My Business,” and “Google” as Google. We counted the sources CallRail labels SearchGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and copilot.com as AI assistants. Nothing was excluded.

Sessions. All sessions in the same period for the 14 Google Analytics 4 properties that recorded data, with AI referrals identified by GA4’s AI assistant channel plus a list of known AI referrer domains. Figures are aggregated and anonymized. No individual business is identified.

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