IT Home November 9 news — Earlier this year, as competitors such as Google and Anthropic gained momentum, ChatGPT's dominance in the AI market at one point showed signs of loosening. However, a new study shows that this flagship OpenAI product is making an unexpected comeback.
A study by research and growth marketing firm Graphite shows that ChatGPT currently accounts for more than 81% of total traffic to major AI chatbot tools worldwide, with no competitor reaching a 10% market share.
Given that Google Gemini and Anthropic Claude have recently attracted much attention and are widely seen as increasingly strong competitive threats to OpenAI, this data is rather surprising.
The study also challenges another belief, namely that ChatGPT's previous explosive growth had stalled.
In the first half of 2025, ChatGPT's usage surged sharply, but then plateaued for 7 consecutive months. This year, however, its growth has accelerated again. Graphite's analysis shows that ChatGPT's monthly visits grew by nearly 20%, reaching 61.35 billion in September this year, a new all-time high.
This data also confirms Business Insider's report last week: ChatGPT's weekly active users have now reached 1.2 billion.
The relevant data shows that although OpenAI's competitors are growing rapidly, they remain far from shaking ChatGPT's leading position.
The study was led by Graphite CEO Ethan Smith and his team. Using data provided by Similarweb, the researchers analyzed website and app traffic to major AI services, including user visits to these services and the traffic these services refer to external websites.
Over the past year, Claude's growth has been particularly outstanding, and Gemini has also expanded rapidly. However, all of this growth started from a base far below ChatGPT's.
Moreover, ChatGPT is not only attracting user visits, but is also increasingly directing users to other websites. Graphite's data shows that global external referral traffic from AI services grew by 92% over the past year, with ChatGPT contributing 60% of that.
The study also reveals how AI is changing Google's traditional search business.
AI Overviews, launched by Google, can provide AI-generated answers directly in search results, and now appear in 62% of search queries in the United States.
Meanwhile, Google AI Mode is also growing rapidly. This feature allows users to use the search service in a more conversational way. In August this year, AI Mode received 491 million web visits in the United States.
Perhaps most surprising is where this AI activity is mainly taking place.
IT Home notes that although the United States leads in AI technology R&D, Graphite's research shows that the US accounts for only 8.8% of global AI traffic. This means that more than 90% of global AI usage comes from outside the United States, highlighting that this AI boom has become a global wave.
Overall, the monthly visits of major AI services worldwide have reached 76 billion, up 37% from the same period last year.
The message of this study is very clear: the AI market is still expanding rapidly, and ChatGPT continues to hold an overwhelming dominant position.