ChatGPT Lost Its Grip on Half the AI Market for the First Time this Year

Welcome back to SavvyMonk, your one-stop for AI and tech news that actually matters. The chatbot that set the pace for the entire industry has slipped under a line nobody expected to cross this year, and the company quietly gaining on it is the one most people overlook.

Let's get into it.

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For most of the past three years there was no real contest. ChatGPT defined what an AI assistant was, and it held more than half of every user who touched one.

That ended in March, when its global share dropped below 50 percent for the first time, and by the end of May it sat at 46.4 percent according to Sensor Tower and its newly published State of AI 2026 report. The firm measures share through a true audience metric that counts unique users across desktop, mobile apps, and the mobile web, so this is not a quirk of one platform. It is the whole picture moving at once.

Gemini climbed to 27.7 percent over the same stretch and Claude reached 10.3 percent, while everything else, including Grok, Perplexity, DeepSeek, and Meta AI, stayed under five percent each.

The Users Are Still There

The easy mistake is to read this as ChatGPT shrinking, and it is not. The app still has roughly 1.1 billion monthly users, and it became the fastest application in history to reach a billion of them, hitting that mark in about three years and beating the pace once set by TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram.

OpenAI counts its audience weekly rather than monthly, and the last figure it shared publicly was 900 million weekly users back in February. Gemini now sits at 662 million monthly users and Claude at 245 million.

The share is slipping not because people are leaving ChatGPT but because the rivals are adding users faster than it is, and the market is finally large enough to support more than one default.

Why People Switch

What changed is that switching stopped feeling like a chore. Sensor Tower found that users move between assistants far more readily than they did a year ago, and specific events can push them all at once.

The clearest example came in February, when OpenAI signed a deal with the Pentagon and ChatGPT uninstalls jumped by 295 percent in the days that followed. That reaction says brand trust and a sense of shared values now weigh on these choices as much as raw capability does. Gemini has gained most of its ground by being wired into Google's wider set of products, so people meet it without going looking for it.

Claude has taken a different path and built a reputation around serious productivity work, and its true audience share in the United States has more than tripled as that reputation spread.

The Number That Actually Matters

Market share makes the headline, but it does not pay the bills, and here the story flips. Claude now earns more revenue per user than ChatGPT does, with its average US mobile figure climbing from under 0.50 dollars last September to 2.76 dollars by May.

ChatGPT brings in about 1.74 dollars per user over the same period, which puts Claude at roughly one and a half times the rate on a far smaller base. The reason is conversion. Thirteen percent of Anthropic's users pay for a subscription, the best rate of any major assistant, and that single number is what investors will fixate on when they try to work out which of these companies is building a real business rather than a very expensive habit.

The Market Is Still Growing

None of this is happening in a shrinking pond. Across the first half of 2026 people are on track to download nearly 2.3 billion AI apps and to spend more than 4.2 billion dollars on them, up from 1.83 billion dollars a year earlier, a rise of about 36 percent.

Time spent tells the same story, climbing from 17.2 billion hours in the first half of 2025 to roughly 36 billion hours this year, with the top three assistants commanding close to 89 percent of all that time.

Oliver Yeh, the co-founder and chief executive of Sensor Tower, framed the surge as marketers, advertisers, and app developers all racing to fold AI into how they reach people. The caution is that growth rates are slowing even as the totals rise, and Asia recorded its first download decline of 3.3 percent in the first quarter on the back of dips in China and India, which hints at a market starting to mature rather than one still finding its ceiling.

Ads and Shopping

The other half of the monetisation push is advertising, and OpenAI began testing ads inside ChatGPT in February. By May about 17 percent of daily users were seeing them, with software and shopping the largest advertiser categories so far.

Shopping is where this gets interesting, because ChatGPT is steering more referral traffic toward retailers like Target, Walmart, and Costco. Amazon has blocked ChatGPT's web crawlers, and its referral traffic from the platform has gone flat as a result, which has opened a gap for others.

Walmart has leaned in with its own assistant, Spark, which keeps gaining, while Amazon's Rufus has seen flat growth, even though Rufus shoppers who do engage spend more time in the app and buy at nearly twice the rate of those who do not.

The Bottom Line

The interesting figure this week is not 46.4 percent, it is 2.76 dollars. ChatGPT losing the majority was always going to happen once the market grew up, but Claude quietly out-earning it on every user is the shift that actually decides who wins. Watch revenue per user and conversion rates from here, because the race stopped being about who has the most people and became about who can turn them into a business.

Category: Competitive Analysis

"Act as a market analyst. I run [Your Product], competing against [Competitor 1], [Competitor 2], and [Competitor 3]. For each rival, give me the single strongest reason a current customer of mine might switch to them, then rank those reasons by how hard each one would be for me to neutralise over the next two quarters. Finish with the one metric I should track weekly to catch customers leaving before the numbers show it."

For three years the safe assumption was that ChatGPT was the market and everyone else was fighting for scraps. That assumption is gone, and the sharper question now is not who has the most users but who can keep them and charge them. If you have switched your main assistant this year, I want to know what finally pushed you. Hit reply, I read every response.

See you in the next one.

— Vivek

P.S. If you know a founder or product lead trying to read the AI market without the hype, forward this their way. They can subscribe at https://savvymonk.beehiiv.com/