You might think that AI chatbots (also known as LLMs) are always referred to by the term “ChatGPT”. It turns out that this is also reflected in real life. Statcounter, a company that tracks market share for operating systems, browsers and social media sites has started tracking the number sessions of users who visit artificial-intelligence sites such as ChatGPT. Google Gemini. Claude AI. Microsoft Copilot. ChatGPT is the clear winner by a huge margin. It has over 80 percent of the market share and is still growing. This coincides with our chatbot tests. Statcounter began tracking statistics in March and they have remained largely the same ever since: ChatGPT dominates the market, with a cluster smaller AI chatbots below. Perplexity AI has been the only significant change so far. It accounted for 16 percent of U.S. users back in March but has since dropped to 6 percent. Microsoft’s Copilot, which began at less than 1 percent of the market and now captures about 10 percent, has seen a rise.
In the U.S., the Statcounter numbers show that in July, 80.22 % of U.S. bot sessions went to ChatGPT. 9.51 % went to Copilot. 5.61 % to Perplexity. 2.67 % to Google Gemini. 1.56 %) to Claude. Deepseek only captured 0.43 %).
Statcounter
Though those numbers reflect the market share for U.S. users, the picture doesn’t differ that much when Viewed from a global perspectiveChatGPT’s share of the market reaches 82.69 %, followed by Perplexity (8.06 %) and Copilot (4.56 %). Statcounter tracked the remaining sessions, which were dominated by Deepseek (1.59%) and Gemini (2.2%). Claude was at the back with 0.91 percent.
It’s not entirely clear how Statcounter calculates its numbers for AI chatbots. Statcounter’s global statistics, in terms of sample size are based on a monthly analysis of more that 5 billion page views across more than 1.5 millions websites. saysCookies on these 1.5 million sites track what devices are accessing them, their operating systems, etc. Statcounter claims that it uses tracking cookies to determine whether a user came from Google, Bing or somewhere else.
One of the challenges of AI chatbots, however, is that they do not send users anywhere else. This is concerning to content creators, especially with the rise of Google’s AI Mode, and AI-powered searches. Statcounter representatives did NOT immediately respond to a comment request.
Mark Hachman, Senior Editor at PCWorld
Mark is a technology writer with over 30 years experience. He has been writing for PCWorld since the last decade. He has written over 3,500 articles, covering PC microprocessors and peripherals, Microsoft Windows, and other topics, for PCWorld. Mark has written for PC Magazine, Byte and eWEEK as well as Popular Science, Electronic Buyers’ News and Electronic Buyers’ News. He also shared a Jesse H. Neal Award with Popular Science for breaking news. He recently gave away a collection consisting of several dozen Thunderbolt Docks and USB-C Hubs, because his office has no room.
