Greater than three and a half years after ChatGPT’s preliminary launch, AI assistants are actually utilized by thousands and thousands of individuals worldwide, and the aggressive panorama is altering quick. Whereas OpenAI’s chatbot continues to be the preferred assistant worldwide, globally, its market share has dipped beneath 50% for the primary time as customers are migrating between totally different assistants like Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, and xAI’s Grok, in accordance 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 preferred 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% due to 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 prepared to modify between assistants. Particular occasions seem to speed up that habits: OpenAI’s take care of 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 basically because of its integration with Google’s broader ecosystem of instruments, Anthropic’s Claude has gained a powerful status for productiveness use instances and is closing in on ChatGPT’s person retention charge.
Within the first half of 2026, persons are on tempo to obtain practically 2.3 billion AI apps and spend over $4.2 billion on them, in accordance with Sensor Tower estimates. That compares to $1.83 billion in spending in H1 2025 — a leap that means the {industry} is shifting its focus from pure development towards monetization. That stated, 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 whole downloads, Asia trails North America and Europe on the subject of 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 p.c of Anthropic’s customers are paying for a subscription plan — a conversion charge that leads the sphere and can be a metric value looking ahead to 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 threat and a chance relying on which gamers transfer first.
OpenAI began experimenting with adverts in ChatGPT in February. In accordance with Sensor Tower, the corporate has scaled the variety of adverts regularly, together with the share of customers who see them. By Could, a median of 17% of each day customers have been being served adverts — a quantity to look at as ChatGPT’s monetization technique evolves past subscriptions.
Software program and purchasing are the biggest advertiser classes in ChatGPT to this point, adopted by Media & Leisure and Meals & Eating.
As ChatGPT deepens its purchasing integrations, it’s more and more sending referral visitors to retailers like Goal, Walmart, and Costco. Amazon, which has blocked ChatGPT’s net crawlers, has seen stagnant referral 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 greater charges than those that didn’t, hinting that on-platform AI can meaningfully affect buying habits when customers really have interaction with it.
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