What you need to know
- A report by Similarweb, a digital data company, shows that Google's Gemini is starting to gain significant ground on its competitor, ChatGPT.
- Gemini has reached 21.5% of the traffic share for Gen AI products, as of early this year, while ChatGPT has dropped to 64.5%.
- Earlier in 2025, one of Google's goals was to help push Gemini into more of the market share, and it did so by making some paid features free for all.
In the world of generative AI, there's a lot; however, data companies are noticing a shift in where users are spending their time seeking answers.
Reported this week by Similarweb on X, generative AI website traffic is slowly shifting, as a not-so-unknown player gains ground. According to the digital data company's analytics, Google's Gemini has reached 21.5% of the traffic share as of January 2, 2026. What's leading the race? OpenAI's ChatGPT with 64.5% of the traffic share. There's one clear fact here, per Similarweb's data: ChatGPT and Gemini are the "top dogs," one might say, for traffic.
Among the many AI names, ChatGPT and Gemini account for ~86% of the traffic. The remaining 14% is divvied up between DeepSeek, X's Grok, Perplexity, Claude, and Microsoft's Copilot (in order).
Even when we get down into AI tools traffic, ChatGPT and Gemini still lead the pack, though the former holds the majority.
What's interesting about where Gemini is now is that it's been gaining ground (slowly, but surely) over the past few months. In actuality, it's been a trend all throughout 2025. Similarweb's timeline shows how Gemini's traffic share has been slowly rising, going from 5.7% a year ago to 18.2% in December 2025.
Gemini v. ChatGPT
First Global AI Tracker of 2026Gen AI Website Worldwide Traffic Share, Key Takeaways:→ Gemini surpassed the 20% share benchmark.→ Grok surpasses 3% and is approaching DeepSeek.→ ChatGPT drops below the 65% mark.🗓️ 12 Months Ago: ChatGPT: 86.7% Gemini: 5.7%… pic.twitter.com/D1lNf1G5srJanuary 7, 2026
Increasing Gemini's market share has been a goal for Google, as the company made a decision: paid features are now free.
To clarify, this concerned Google making its Gemini 2.5 Pro experiment free for users just four days after it debuted in March. OpenAI's ChatGPT came out of left field, but it's how the general public views that Gen AI chatbot, as opposed to every other company's version. When ChatGPT debuted, it stunned and retained users, reaching 700 million monthly active users.
This is when Google started making shifts toward Gemini, and then, Apple started to wiggle itself into the mix. Here's the thing: everyone was playing catch-up. While most companies are still playing catch-up, Gemini's doing so at a seemingly faster rate, at least, per the data.
Google and OpenAI aren't slowing down one bit, as the former introduced Gemini features for its TV service, turning it into another companion. For OpenAI, the company recently introduced ChatGPT Health, a dedicated chatting experience with its AI that can help users with medical records and app data.
