SimilarWeb data has indicated that ChatGPT is losing ground to Gemini, and increasingly Claude in terms of web visits, and this trend seems to be replicating in its app performance.
New data from Apptopia tracking U.S. daily active users (DAU) across the top seven generative AI chatbot apps shows ChatGPT’s share falling to 38.7% in March 2026 — the first time it has broken below 40%, and the fourth consecutive month of decline. Just six months ago, in September 2025, it held nearly 52% of DAU share. Downloads ticked up 8% from February, but that failed to arrest the slide in actual daily engagement.
More interestingly, in the overall market, ChatGPT’s DAUs seem to have been falling regularly since October 2025, indicating that it’s not only losing marketshare to rivals, but also actual users.
Gemini, Claude Gain
The sharpest move in the March data belongs to Anthropic’s Claude, which jumped to 10% DAU share — up from roughly 4% in February and under 2% as recently as December. The driver was a 167% month-over-month surge in DAU, alongside 7.4 million downloads: nearly triple its February total and more than 14x its September figure.
This follows a broader pattern. Claude’s web traffic grew 297% year-over-year through early 2026 following its run-in with the US government, and its web traffic share nearly tripled in a single quarter — from 2.22% to 6.02% — between December 2025 and March 2026. The app surge appears to be the mobile manifestation of the same momentum.
Google Gemini held its ground at roughly 25% DAU share and continues to sit comfortably in second place. DAU grew modestly month-over-month, and downloads ticked up 7%. The app has been remarkably stable since December — a notable achievement given the competitive turbulence. Gemini’s Android distribution advantage, which reaches users who never actively download a standalone AI app, remains a structural edge.
Grok gave back some ground, with DAU share slipping from 15.3% to 13.5% and downloads falling 13%. After a strong run from September through February — climbing from 8% to over 15% share — March may be the first sign of a plateau. Still, power user time spent in the app actually increased to 120 minutes per day, suggesting core engagement remains solid.
The Edges of the Market
Microsoft Copilot has quietly stabilized near 10% DAU share for three consecutive months. Its power users spend 154 minutes daily in the app — the highest figure among all tracked platforms — raising the question of whether Microsoft can convert that depth of engagement into a broader, more mainstream user base.
Perplexity continues to lose share on a DAU basis, now at 2.1%, but March showed the first signs of a recovery: downloads grew 39%, average session time rose from 13 to 15 minutes, and power user churn dropped to 11.7%, the lowest in the dataset. It remains a niche product with a loyal core.
DeepSeek has continued its steady decline, falling to roughly 1% DAU share and 114,000 daily users, down from 179,000 in September. It is effectively fading from the U.S. competitive picture — a striking reversal for an app that generated intense buzz earlier in 2025.
What the Data Signals
The overall Gen AI chatbot app market grew 5% from February to March, and 22% since September 2025. But that growth is being driven almost entirely by challengers eating into ChatGPT’s share — not by ChatGPT’s own expansion. The market share erosion mirrors what is happening on the web, where ChatGPT has fallen from over 77% of generative AI traffic a year ago to 56.7% in March 2026.
All is not lost however — OpenAI is slated to come out with a new ‘Spud’ model in the next few days, and it’ll hope that the new capabilities can stem the decline. But if they don’t, ChatGPT’s market-share will be up for grabs among players like Gemini and Claude which will be looking to build their own userbases for the coming years of the AI race.