Google Gemini continues to grow its userbase — and eat into ChatGPT’s users.
According to SimilarWeb’s May 2026 rankings of the world’s top-visited websites, Gemini has climbed three places to sit at #12 globally. That puts it ahead of most of the internet — social networks, news sites, streaming platforms, all of it. For an AI chatbot that launched its current incarnation only a few years ago, reaching the top 12 of the entire web is a significant landmark.
ChatGPT, meanwhile, holds at #5, where it has been since surpassing X.com a year ago. The lack of movement in either direction is notable in itself. OpenAI’s product remains the dominant AI destination on the internet, but it’s no longer the one generating momentum.
The gap between them has been narrowing for months. Gemini’s traffic grew 643% year-over-year in February 2026, compared to ChatGPT’s 37% over the same period. More recently, Gemini crossed the milestone of getting half as much traffic as ChatGPT — a figure that would have seemed implausible as recently as early 2025, when ChatGPT commanded nearly 80% of all generative AI web traffic. Google has benefited from its sheer distribution advantage: Gemini is baked into Android, into Search, into Google Workspace. That kind of surface area makes user acquisition almost structurally inevitable.
Elsewhere in the rankings, DeepSeek gained 3 spots to reach #75, a quiet but consistent upward move for the Chinese AI lab whose low-cost model stunned the industry when it first emerged. Both Grok and Perplexity had rougher months. Grok dropped 10 places to #122, and Perplexity fell 28 spots to sit at #235 — the steepest decline among the major AI platforms. Perplexity has been pulling in a loyal base of research-focused users for some time, but converting that niche into sustained traffic growth has proven difficult. Claude holds at #36, unchanged from April.
The May data reinforces a pattern that’s been visible for several months: the AI traffic landscape is bifurcating. ChatGPT and Gemini are pulling further ahead of the rest of the field in raw reach, while platforms like Grok and Perplexity compete on engagement depth rather than visitor volume. Grok leads all AI platforms in average session duration at over 12 minutes per visit — more than double any other platform — which suggests its smaller audience uses it very differently from casual chatbot visitors.
The engagement question is also the central one for Gemini’s long-term story. Downloads and traffic rankings tell one part of it. Gemini led ChatGPT in app downloads in February 2026, but ChatGPT still holds nearly 4x the monthly active users, and its DAU/MAU ratio remains significantly higher — meaning its users return more frequently. Climbing to #12 on the global web is one thing; holding people there is the harder problem Google still has to solve.
What May 2026 makes clear is that the AI web has its two leaders, and then a significant drop-off. The race for the top is effectively between two companies, and Google is the only one moving.