ChatGPT’s AI dominance is waning badly

ChatGPT’s once dominant grip of the AI chatbot market is faltering in the face of competition from Google Gemini and Elon Musk’s Grok, new data has revealed.

In January 2025, ChatGPT had almost 70% market share in the chatbot market according to data from Apptopia, which claims to collate data from 15 million mobile devices. That market share has now shrunk to 45.3%.

The rising stars of the market are Google’s Gemini and Grok. Gemini had a 14.7% market share a year ago, which has now risen to 25.2%. Grok now has 15.2% of the market, up around three percentage points from a year ago.

Other AI chatbot apps, such as Microsoft’s Copilot, Perplexity, Claude and DeepSeek fall into the category of also-rans.

It’s worth pointing out that the data is measuring mobile app usage only, not browser/desktop usage, which is likely to paint a different picture, particularly for Microsoft’s Copilot which is now heavily embedded into Windows 11.

Still, the data will be a cause for mild alarm at OpenAI, which has seen its early lead in the AI chatbot market seriously eroded by the competition, and competition with very deep pockets.

Apptopia’s data also suggests that the AI chatbot market may be reaching saturation point. Rapid growth through the early part of 2025 has given way to a more steady increase in the growth of users over the past four months in particular.

That’s somewhat surprising given that Apptopia’s figures show that the vast majority of people have never used an AI chatbot app. Only around 30% of people in its study have a chatbot app installed and most of those are labelled as “light users”, which means they use the apps for less than five minutes a day or less than three times per month.

Those that do use chatbot apps are reasonably promiscuous with their usage too, with one in five people having more than one such app installed. That’s up from only one in 20 at the end of 2023.

“ChatGPT built the category, but as viable alternatives have scaled, users are naturally diversifying their toolkit,” said Tom Grant, VP of Research at Apptopia in a statement. “The multi-app usage figure is the number I’d watch here. It tells me that people aren’t just experimenting anymore, they’re building workflows around specific products for specific use cases.”

Grant predicts the chatbot market could follow a similar path to the streaming industry, where “a few major players own the market but multiple players can carve out niches based on product differentiation rather than pure network effects”.

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