Google Gemini appears to have firmly established itself as a competitor to ChatGPT — and it’s still gaining ground.
New data from SimilarWeb covering April 2026 shows Gemini holding 26.7% of global generative AI web traffic share, putting it at half of ChatGPT’s 53.7%. Twelve months ago, that gap was an abyss: ChatGPT commanded 77.6% while Gemini sat at just 7.27%. The compression has been relentless, and April’s numbers confirm it hasn’t slowed.
The Numbers Tell the Story
The trajectory of the last year is striking. ChatGPT has shed nearly 24 percentage points of traffic share since May 2025, while Gemini has more than tripled its share in the same window. The generative AI market, once effectively a monopoly, is now something closer to a two-player race.
April was a particularly strong month for Gemini in absolute terms. The platform recorded 2.761 billion total visits — a record high — representing 574.47% year-over-year growth and a 6.38% month-over-month increase. SimilarWeb noted it was among the only sites in the global top 20 to grow in April, alongside TikTok, and marked Gemini’s 16th consecutive month of traffic growth.
Claude had the highest month-over-month growth rate of any platform in April at 34.18%, followed by DeepSeek at 17.24%. ChatGPT declined 3.84%, Grok fell 14.43%, and Perplexity dropped 7.17%.
How Gemini Got Here
Gemini’s rise has been building for over a year. It first crossed the 20% traffic share milestone in January 2026 — a threshold no other platform had breached since ChatGPT’s emergence. By February, Gemini’s year-over-year traffic grew 643% compared to just 37% for ChatGPT — a gap that illustrated how sharply the momentum had shifted.
Several product moves drove the acceleration. The launch of the Nano Banana image generation model in mid-2025 gave Gemini a viral moment. Gemini 3 Pro strengthened its reasoning capabilities. And Google’s strategy of bundling Gemini across Android devices and Google Workspace has steadily converted its ecosystem advantage into traffic. In February 2026, Gemini even surpassed ChatGPT in app downloads — 101 million to 65 million.
The Engagement Gap Remains
Traffic share, though, is not the whole picture. ChatGPT still leads Gemini in monthly active users by nearly 4x, suggesting OpenAI retains a stronger hold on habitual, returning users even as Gemini wins the new-visitor race. ChatGPT’s DAU/MAU ratio of 36% — nearly double Gemini’s 21% — reinforces the point: ChatGPT users come back far more frequently.
Geographically, Gemini’s growth hasn’t been uniform. It is most competitive in Japan and South Korea, where Android penetration is high and Google’s device-bundling strategy pays off. In the US, ChatGPT still holds roughly 80% of AI chatbot traffic. India tells a similar story, despite significant Gemini advertising investment there.
What It Means
Twelve months ago, the generative AI web looked like a settled market. It isn’t anymore. Gemini has demonstrated that ecosystem integration and sustained model releases can close a large gap, even against an entrenched first mover. ChatGPT’s absolute traffic numbers — billions of monthly visits — still put it in a different league, but its share is compressing in a way that would have seemed implausible in early 2025.