After SimilarWeb, another source is saying that Gemini is now being used more than half as much as ChatGPT.
A new Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults conducted February 17–23, 2026, finds that 44% of Americans say they use ChatGPT, compared to 24% for Google’s Gemini. The gap is meaningful, but the more striking data point is how far Gemini has come. No other AI chatbot is close to either of them — Microsoft Copilot sits at 17%, Meta AI at 14%, Grok at 8%, Claude at 6%, and Character.ai at just 3%.
The Pew data is a self-reported usage survey, which measures something different from web traffic share — but the directional signal is consistent with what SimilarWeb has been showing for months. SimilarWeb’s April 2026 data put Gemini at 26.7% of global generative AI web traffic versus ChatGPT’s 53.7%, making Gemini roughly half of ChatGPT by traffic. Pew’s numbers land in a similar place: Gemini at roughly 55% of ChatGPT’s reported usage among U.S. adults.
A year ago, this kind of comparison would have seemed premature. In mid-2025, ChatGPT commanded close to 79% of generative AI traffic share while Gemini held around 8%. The compression since then has been significant, driven by Gemini’s ecosystem integration across Android and Google Workspace, a sustained cadence of model releases, and a viral moment from its Nano Banana image generation feature in mid-2025.
Where the Pew data adds something new is in the self-reported nature of the question. Web traffic can include casual visitors, search redirects, and API calls. “Do you use this?” is a more deliberate signal. The fact that 24% of U.S. adults say they use Gemini — a figure that would have been implausible even 18 months ago — reflects genuine consumer awareness, not just passive exposure through Google Search.
The engagement picture, though, is more complicated. ChatGPT’s DAU/MAU ratio runs at about 36%, nearly double Gemini’s 21%, which means ChatGPT users return to the platform far more habitually. Gemini has been more effective at acquiring users than at holding them in frequent, daily patterns. In February 2026, Gemini actually led ChatGPT in app downloads — 101 million to 65 million — but ChatGPT still held nearly four times the monthly active users.
The rest of the Pew rankings illustrate how concentrated the market remains. Copilot’s 17% is notable given Microsoft’s deep enterprise integration, but Grok at 8% and Claude at 6% — despite both receiving significant media attention — suggest that general consumer awareness has yet to translate into broad reported usage. Character.ai’s 3% represents a more specialized use case, largely among younger users seeking conversational and roleplay experiences rather than productivity assistance.
Pew’s findings arrive as the competitive dynamics of the AI chatbot market are shifting faster than most analysts anticipated. Gemini crossed the 20% traffic share threshold for the first time in January 2026 — something no competitor had done since ChatGPT’s emergence — and has continued building since. The Pew survey, capturing self-reported behavior from a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults, adds a consumer-perception layer to what has largely been a web traffic story. Both data sources are now pointing in the same direction.