Greater than three and a half years after ChatGPT’s preliminary launch, AI assistants at the moment are utilized by tens of millions of individuals worldwide, and the aggressive panorama is altering quick. Whereas OpenAI’s chatbot remains to be the most well-liked assistant worldwide, globally, its market share has dipped under 50% for the primary time as customers are migrating between completely different assistants like Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, and xAI’s Grok, in line with analytics agency Sensor Tower’s State of AI Report for 2026.
ChatGPT’s development has been spectacular. It grew to become the quickest app ever to achieve 1 billion month-to-month customers, as Sensor Tower reported this month. Notably, OpenAI counts weekly lively customers, and it final reported 900 million of them in February. The chatbot nonetheless stays the most well-liked AI assistant worldwide with over 1.1 billion month-to-month customers, adopted by Gemini with 662 million and Claude with 245 million.
Till January, ChatGPT commanded over 50% market share, however by Could’s finish, it had fallen to 46.4% because of the rise of Gemini (27.7%) and Claude (10.3%). Different assistants, together with Grok, Perplexity, DeepSeek, and Meta AI, have lower than 5% market share.
Sensor Tower’s State of AI Report additionally discovered that customers are more and more keen to modify between assistants. Particular occasions seem to speed up that habits: OpenAI’s cope with the U.S. Division of Protection (DoD) in February triggered a measurable spike in uninstalls, for instance — suggesting model belief and values alignment matter to customers, not simply options. Whereas Gemini’s momentum is essentially resulting from its integration with Google’s broader ecosystem of instruments, Anthropic’s Claude has gained a robust popularity for productiveness use instances and is closing in on ChatGPT’s person retention fee.
Within the first half of 2026, individuals are on tempo to obtain practically 2.3 billion AI apps and spend over $4.2 billion on them, in line with Sensor Tower estimates. That compares to $1.83 billion in spending in H1 2025 — a bounce that means the {industry} is shifting its focus from pure development towards monetization. That mentioned, each obtain and spend development charges have decelerated, an indicator that the market could also be maturing whilst absolute numbers climb.
Regionally, Asia recorded the primary obtain decline of three.3% in Q1 2026, drive by dips in China and India. Regardless of main globally in complete downloads, Asia trails North America and Europe relating to in-app spending — a break up that issues for firms deciding the place to spend money on premium options and monetization.
Within the U.S., customers are gravitating towards AI assistants for productiveness duties and spending extra on premium options. Throughout platforms, common income per person has grown industry-wide, however Claude is standing out. 13 % of Anthropic’s customers are paying for a subscription plan — a conversion fee that leads the sector and will likely be a metric value anticipating traders evaluating which AI companies are constructing lasting income.
Sensor Tower estimates that the hours spent on AI apps may have elevated from 17.2 billion hours in H1 2025 to roughly 36 billion hours in H1 2026. The highest three assistants command 89% time spent on AI assistant apps. In the meantime, adjoining classes like AI companions or AI content material era apps stay fragmented and vast open to competitors, which represents each a danger and a chance relying on which gamers transfer first.
OpenAI began experimenting with adverts in ChatGPT in February. In line with Sensor Tower, the corporate has scaled the variety of adverts steadily, together with the share of customers who see them. By Could, a mean of 17% of day by day customers have been being served adverts — a quantity to observe as ChatGPT’s monetization technique evolves past subscriptions.
Software program and purchasing are the most important advertiser classes in ChatGPT up to now, adopted by Media & Leisure and Meals & Eating.
As ChatGPT deepens its purchasing integrations, it’s more and more sending referral site visitors to retailers like Goal, Walmart, and Costco. Amazon, which has blocked ChatGPT’s net crawlers, has seen stagnant referral site visitors from the platform because of this.
That creates a gap for others. Websites like Walmart have embedded their very own AI assistants to assist customers discover merchandise. Whereas Amazon’s Rufus has seen flat person development, Walmart’s Spark has been gaining floor. Sensor Tower additionally famous that Amazon customers who used Rufus each spent extra time within the app and transformed at increased charges than those that didn’t, hinting that on-platform AI can meaningfully affect buying habits when customers truly interact with it.
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