Gemini is continuing to surge in popularity as it looks to catch up to ChatGPT.
New year-over-year traffic data from SimilarWeb for February 2026 underscores just how dramatically the generative AI landscape has shifted over the past twelve months. Google’s Gemini led all major AI platforms with a staggering 643.58% year-over-year growth in web traffic — by far the highest figure among the platforms tracked. In contrast, OpenAI’s ChatGPT.com posted a comparatively modest 37.04% YoY growth, reflecting the widening momentum gap between the two leading AI chatbots.
Gemini’s Explosive Rise
Gemini’s 643% growth is remarkable by any measure, and it builds on a consistent trajectory of acceleration that has played out over the last year. Earlier data had already shown Gemini growing three times faster than ChatGPT over a six-month window in 2025. The platform benefited from a series of high-profile product launches — including the Gemini 3 Pro model and the Nano Banana image generation capabilities — that drew significant user attention and cemented its position as a genuine alternative to ChatGPT. Google has also aggressively promoted Gemini through TV advertising in key markets such as India, helping expand its reach beyond the tech-enthusiast core.
By January 2026, Gemini’s traffic share had crossed the 20% mark for the first time in the generative AI space, while ChatGPT had fallen to around 64%, having shed more than 22 percentage points over twelve months. What was effectively a monopoly in consumer AI just a year ago has now evolved into a two-player race, with Google closing the gap at a pace few anticipated.
ChatGPT Still Leads in Scale, But Growth Slows
ChatGPT’s 37% year-over-year growth is not insignificant — it reflects sustained demand for the world’s most widely used AI assistant. But against Gemini’s 643%, it highlights that OpenAI’s platform is increasingly operating from a position of incumbency rather than momentum. Previous SimilarWeb data from mid-2025 showed ChatGPT commanding nearly 79% of generative AI traffic share. That dominance has since eroded considerably, though ChatGPT’s sheer scale — billions of monthly visits — still puts it in a league of its own in absolute terms.
One area where ChatGPT continues to hold a decisive edge is user engagement. While Gemini has surpassed ChatGPT in time spent per visit on desktop and mobile web, ChatGPT’s daily stickiness remains significantly higher. According to a16z’s State of Consumer AI 2025 report (citing Yipit data), ChatGPT’s DAU/MAU ratio of 36% is nearly double Gemini’s 21%, suggesting ChatGPT users return to the platform far more habitually than Gemini’s growing user base.
Grok and Claude Grow; DeepSeek Slides
Beyond the two headline players, the February 2026 data paints a nuanced picture for the rest of the field. Grok.com — xAI’s AI assistant — recorded 480.17% year-over-year growth, placing it second only to Gemini in terms of YoY expansion. Grok has shown consistent momentum in recent months, and the February figure cements its status as a serious third-tier player in the generative AI space. Claude.ai, Anthropic’s conversational AI, posted 297.69% year-over-year growth — a strong figure that reflects steady user interest even as the platform competes without the same marketing firepower as Google or OpenAI. Perplexity.ai rounded out the tracked platforms with 39.27% growth, maintaining its niche as an AI-powered search and research tool.
The outlier in the data is DeepSeek.com, which recorded a 55.56% year-over-year decline in traffic — the only platform in the cohort to post negative growth. DeepSeek’s trajectory has been volatile: the platform surged dramatically in early 2025, capturing significant attention and market share after the release of its R1 model, but has since retreated sharply. The comparison period — February 2025 — was precisely when DeepSeek was at peak hype, making the year-over-year decline especially pronounced. It illustrates how difficult it is to sustain viral-level traffic without continuous product differentiation.
What This Means for the AI Market
The February 2026 SimilarWeb data tells a clear story: the generative AI market is no longer ChatGPT’s to lose — it is Google’s to win. Gemini’s integration into Google’s vast product ecosystem, combined with a sustained cadence of compelling model releases, has converted it from a laggard into the fastest-growing major AI platform by a wide margin. The question for the rest of 2026 is whether Gemini can translate traffic growth into the kind of deep daily engagement that has historically defined ChatGPT’s moat — and whether OpenAI can find a new growth catalyst before the gap in momentum becomes a gap in market share.