ChatGPT is growing again, and your buyers are using more than one chatbot

Similarweb projects that ChatGPT drew about 5.9 billion web visits worldwide in September, up from 5.6 billion in August and its highest month since October 2025, when it logged an estimated 6.2 billion, Forbes reported on October 5. ChatGPT had dipped to 5.4 billion visits in both February and June before the climb.

Its rivals are big now too. Gemini logged about 2.6 billion visits in September, down from 2.9 billion in June, and Claude about 996.4 million. In August, ChatGPT took about 55.5% of web visits to the leading chatbots. That was up from 52.7% in July, but down from about three quarters a year earlier.

These are web traffic estimates from one data firm, so treat them as a direction rather than a census. The direction is clear, though. ChatGPT is still the biggest chatbot by a wide margin, and it no longer has the market to itself.

The loyalty numbers in the same Similarweb data tell the bigger story. In August, 64.1% of ChatGPT's visitors used no other leading chatbot. For Gemini it was about 54%, and for Claude 26.4%. Put the other way around, roughly three in four Claude visitors, nearly half of Gemini's and more than a third of ChatGPT's also used a competitor.

Survey data shows how quickly chatbot use is spreading. In a February 2026 survey of 5,119 U.S. adults, Pew Research Center found that 49% use AI chatbots, up from 33% in 2024. The share who use ChatGPT has climbed from 18% in 2023 to 44%. Adults under 50 are about twice as likely as those 50 and older to use it, 57% compared with 28%, and about four in ten adults say they use chatbots to search for information.

The shift shows up in sales data, too. Adobe, which analyzed more than 1 trillion visits to U.S. retail sites, found that traffic from AI sources to those sites grew 393% in the first three months of 2026 compared with a year earlier.

Those visitors are also better customers than they used to be. In March 2026, shoppers who arrived from an AI source converted 42% better than other traffic, a reversal from March 2025, when they converted 38% worse. Adobe found they spend 48% more time on the site, view 13% more pages per visit and have a 12% higher engagement rate.

Search itself is moving the same way. Bain & Company found that about 80% of consumers rely on zero-click results, answers that appear right on the results page, in at least 40% of their searches, which Bain estimates has cut organic web traffic by 15% to 25%. In the same research, 42% of people who use AI chatbots said they use them for shopping recommendations.

McKinsey puts a dollar figure on it. Half of consumers already use AI-powered search, and McKinsey estimates it stands to affect $750 billion in revenue by 2028. Among people who use AI search, 44% call it their primary and preferred source of insight, ahead of traditional search at 31%, retailer or brand websites at 9% and review sites at 6%.

Taken together, the numbers point the same way. Fewer people click through to websites, the visits that do arrive are closer to buying, and the shortlist of brands increasingly gets decided inside an AI answer.

AEO stands for answer engine optimization. It is the work of making your business easy for AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Google's AI Overviews to find, understand and cite when they answer a question. Traditional SEO earns you a place in a list of links. AEO earns you a mention inside the answer itself.

One reason AEO is harder is that AI tools don't rely mostly on your own website. McKinsey found that a brand's own sites often make up only 5% to 10% of the sources AI search references. The rest comes from places like affiliates and user-generated content, which means what other people say about you carries real weight.

Another reason is that many websites are hard for AI to read. Adobe's AI Content Visibility Checker gave U.S. retail homepages an average score of 75%, meaning roughly a quarter of their content isn't readable by AI models. Product pages scored 66%.

The platforms spell out the basics. Google says a page must be indexed and eligible to show in Search with a snippet to appear as a supporting link in its AI features. OpenAI says sites can allow its search crawler, OAI-SearchBot, so their pages can appear in ChatGPT search results.

Start with what your customers actually do. Pick the five questions people ask before they call you, and ask them in ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Google. Write down which businesses get named and which pages get cited. That list is your AEO baseline.

If your business is missing from those answers, or a competitor is named in your place, that is the gap AEO work is built to close.

So build on what moves with you. Pages that are easy for AIs to understand get quoted across chatbots, so we are not just building pages for humans to read but LLMs, which is a whole different ballgame.

If you want help deciding where your brand needs to show up in AI answers this quarter, talk to our founders below. See you in the next edition.