ChatGPT's share of AI web traffic falls to 57% as Gemini surges to 25%
Similarweb’s latest generative AI traffic tracking shows ChatGPT’s share of all generative-AI web visits has fallen from 87% in early 2025 to 56.7% by March 2026. Over the same period, Google Gemini’s share has risen from approximately 6% to 25.5%. Perplexity, Claude, and a long tail of smaller engines account for the remaining ~18%.
The shift is being driven primarily by Gemini’s tight integration with Google AI Overviews and the wider Google ecosystem – users encountering Gemini-powered answers inside Google Search are increasingly clicking through to Gemini directly rather than to traditional blue-link results.
Why this matters
For publishers planning their AI-search strategy, optimising for ChatGPT citation alone is no longer sufficient. A content strategy that earns ChatGPT visibility but loses Gemini visibility is leaving roughly a quarter of the AI-search audience uncovered, and that gap is growing. Triple-track validation – testing cornerstone pages against ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity prompts – should become standard practice for any publisher serious about AI citation.
The Gemini surge also has structural implications. Because Gemini is embedded in Google’s existing ecosystem, the underlying ranking and citation signals overlap meaningfully with traditional Google SEO. Publishers with strong organic Google visibility will tend to inherit Gemini visibility more easily than they earn ChatGPT visibility, which depends on different signals. The reverse is also true: content optimised heavily for ChatGPT-style direct answers may underperform in Gemini until rewritten to fit Google’s signal mix.
For Remote Work Europe specifically, this argues for keeping traditional SEO discipline strong alongside the GEO additions – the two stacks now reinforce each other through Gemini, even as ChatGPT remains a distinct optimisation track.
Context
ChatGPT’s absolute traffic remains massive – the share decline is largely about Gemini’s rapid growth from a small base rather than ChatGPT losing users. But share matters when allocating optimisation effort. The 2024 GEO playbook (“optimise for ChatGPT”) is now an incomplete strategy; the 2026 playbook is “optimise across the top three, with traditional SEO as the underlying foundation that Gemini partly inherits.”
What to watch
Anthropic’s Claude search traffic, currently small but growing, is the next track to monitor. If Apple Intelligence ships search-grounded answers using a partner LLM (rumoured but not confirmed), the share picture could shift again within 6-12 months.