OpenAI shut down Sora in what seemed like a sudden decision yesterday, but the platform had been steadily losing marketshare for a while.
SimilarWeb traffic data covering March 2025 through February 2026 tells a clear story. Sora — represented by the dominant blue bar — commanded roughly 20% of AI video generation traffic in early 2025, then spiked to around 43–50% between April and June, likely riding the wave of its much-hyped launch cycle. But from July 2025 onward, that share collapsed. By February 2026, Sora’s slice had shrunk to around 10% — its lowest point in the entire 12-month window.
The beneficiary was Grok Imagine, xAI’s image and short video generation tool, which Musk has described as an “AI Vine.” Shown in pink/red, Grok’s share was negligible through mid-2025 but began climbing sharply from October, eventually accounting for roughly 40–45% of category traffic by February 2026 — far outpacing every other player including KlingAI, HeyGen, RunwayML, and Veed.io.
This wasn’t just Sora losing ground to one rival. The “Other” category (purple) also remained substantial throughout, suggesting the AI video space fragmented even as Grok consolidated. Google Flow, KlingAI, and HeyGen carved out consistent mid-single-digit shares.
The timing is significant. Sora launched in late September 2025 as a TikTok-style social app for AI-generated video, powered by the Sora 2 model. It hit the top of the App Store charts and crossed a million downloads faster than ChatGPT once had. But retention fell apart almost immediately. Downloads peaked at roughly 3.3 million in November 2025, then dropped 32% in December alone. By February 2026, monthly downloads were down nearly 75% from peak — and that free-fall is clearly visible in the SimilarWeb chart as Sora’s blue bar shrinks month after month while Grok’s pink bar rises.
The SimilarWeb data also reframes what looked like a sudden shutdown. OpenAI announced on March 24, 2026 that it was discontinuing Sora across iOS, API, and Sora.com. But from a market share perspective, Sora had already effectively lost the consumer video generation battle before the plug was pulled. The stated rationale — reallocating compute toward robotics and world simulation research — makes more sense when you see it against a backdrop of a product that had already been displaced in the market.
Grok Imagine’s rise has been swift. xAI launched the tool in mid-2025, and it is now one of the four core pillars of xAI’s restructured organization, alongside the Grok chatbot, coding, and Macrohard. Within hours of OpenAI’s announcement, Elon Musk posted that “the next Grok Imagine release will be epic. We are doubling down.” The SimilarWeb data suggests that wasn’t just opportunistic chest-thumping — xAI was already winning.
The broader lesson cuts across the AI industry. The race to build consumer AI products — social video apps, image generators, creative tools — has proven far harder to monetize than enterprise tooling. The same shutdown announcement that pulled the plug on Sora also unraveled a never-closed $1 billion deal with Disney. OpenAI is now explicitly pivoting to chase Anthropic’s enterprise-focused model, where discipline around product scope has translated into commanding API market share and a clearer path to profitability.
For xAI, the exit of Sora could be a crucial opening. It has lagged other players in the AI race thus far, but with a lead in video generation models, could well carve out a niche for itself from where it could look to make inroads into other parts of the AI space.