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The AI Market Is Changing: ChatGPT Is Losing Its Advantage
ChatGPT’s share of web traffic is gradually declining, while competitors continue gaining audience share. All of this is happening precisely at a time when businesses are increasingly beginning to look beyond OpenAI.
For a long time, the word ChatGPT was almost synonymous with artificial intelligence. But now that association is becoming harder to defend.
According to SimilarWeb, in May 2025 ChatGPT controlled 77.6% of global web traffic among generative AI services. By April 2026, that share had fallen to 53.7%. OpenAI still remains the market leader, but over the year the company lost roughly a quarter of its share.
And most importantly, that traffic did not move to just one competitor.
Google Gemini grew from 7.27% to 26.7% over the same period, nearly quadrupling its market share. Claude rose from 1.37% to 7.95%, showing almost sixfold growth.
Grok, Perplexity, and DeepSeek also continued growing, although not as sharply. The AI market is beginning to fragment among different players, and OpenAI currently feels the consequences of this fragmentation more than anyone else.
ChatGPT’s share is falling while Gemini and Claude continue to grow. Source: SimilarWeb.
But it is important to understand what web traffic data actually measures. It tracks visits to chatbot websites, not API requests, enterprise contracts, or the use of models inside third-party applications. If someone visits ChatGPT.com to write an email, that counts. But a developer running millions of requests through the Claude API is not reflected in these statistics at all.
Therefore, this data reflects popularity among ordinary users more than actual revenues or the scale of technology adoption.
And this is where a second dataset appears, showing a similar picture.
This week, Ramp AI Index, which tracks paid AI subscriptions among more than 50,000 American companies, published its May 2026 update. For the first time ever, the service recorded that more companies are paying for Anthropic solutions than for OpenAI products.
In April, the share of businesses using Anthropic increased by 3.8%, reaching 34.4%. OpenAI saw the opposite trend: its figure fell by 2.9%, down to 32.3%.
Anthropic surpassed OpenAI by the number of paying companies in the U.S. Source: Ramp AI Index.
Ramp chief economist Ara Kharazian called this a striking reversal. Just a year ago, only 9% of companies on the platform paid for Anthropic products. Now that figure has quadrupled. Over the same 12 months, OpenAI’s corporate adoption grew by only 0.3%.
The main driver of Anthropic’s growth was Claude Code, an AI-agent programming tool that is rapidly gaining popularity among developers at companies of all sizes.
Uber’s CTO publicly stated that the company spent its entire 2026 AI budget in just four months, largely because of Claude Code usage. According to him, monthly API expenses per engineer reached between $500 and $2,000.
But Ramp’s data contains an important nuance. Through a company representative, OpenAI stated that its largest enterprise deals do not go through corporate cards at all.
“We are engaged in large-scale business transformation. Contracts like these are not paid for with a credit card,” the company said, according to Axios.
And there is logic to that. Ramp’s methodology captures a large share of corporate AI spending, but it still does not fully reflect the market.
At the same time, Ramp believes it will be difficult for Anthropic to maintain leadership. The report highlighted several risks at once.
First, the token-based pricing model pushes users toward more expensive models. Second, Claude has recently faced outages and complaints about performance quality. In addition, cheaper inference platforms are rapidly growing across the market, which is also reflected in Ramp’s own data.
The report separately noted that OpenAI’s Codex performs similar developer tasks at a lower cost, while switching between services is currently quite easy.
Traders and investors are closely watching this competition. As Decrypt previously reported, Anthropic shares on the secondary market platform Forge Global were valued at approximately $1 trillion, which is higher than OpenAI’s $880 billion valuation on the same platform. And just three months ago, Anthropic’s valuation stood at only $380 billion.
In effect, the market is showing that it is beginning to believe in the company’s current growth, even if some expectations still appear overly optimistic.
Both OpenAI and Anthropic criticized such valuations. But despite that, these figures still remain a kind of thermometer for market sentiment, even on relatively illiquid platforms.
Meanwhile, Google Gemini has continued strengthening its position since at least mid-2025. Much of this has been helped by Android integration — a distribution advantage that competitors simply do not have.
ChatGPT largely grew due to the novelty effect and its status as the first major player in the market. But both of those advantages are gradually losing strength.
Now the main question for OpenAI is different: whether the company can regain leadership through its products themselves. According to Ramp, next month the market will pay especially close attention to Codex growth and new OpenAI enterprise contracts.
