OPENAI
ChatGPT is in decline - Grok and Google are to blame
OpenAI’s competitors are starting to catch up to ChatGPT.
Among daily U.S. mobile users, ChatGPT’s market share fell from 69.1% in January 2025 to 45.3% in January 2026, based on data from Apptopia.
During the same period, Gemini grew from 14.7% to 25.1% and Grok rose from 1.6% to 15.2%.
The chatbot market is still growing quickly overall, up 152% compared to last year, and ChatGPT continues to see strong downloads.
But the gap between platforms is getting smaller.
On the web, Similarweb shows the same trend.
Visits to ChatGPT increased from 3.8 billion to 5.7 billion over the year.
Gemini saw much faster growth, jumping from 267.7 million to 2 billion.
In brief:
ChatGPT is still number one, but others are catching up.
Gemini and Grok are growing fast, especially online.
The chatbot market is still expanding, but growth is starting to slow down.
The race is officially crowded
Analysts also noticed that ChatGPT traffic dipped slightly in late 2025, while Gemini grew sharply.
Early January data suggests ChatGPT is recovering, but Gemini is still rising.
After a big surge through most of 2025, chatbot growth has slowed a little in recent months, suggesting the market may be settling into a more competitive phase.
If I were in their place, I’d honestly blame the retrograde. - MG