ChatGPT loses first True Audience share lead as rivals gain ground
ChatGPT still leads with 1.1 billion monthly users, but its True Audience share slipped below 50% as Gemini and Claude gained ground.
ChatGPT still towers over the field, but the latest audience data show a market that is no longer built around one dominant assistant. Sensor Tower said ChatGPT’s True Audience share, which counts unique users across mobile app and web, fell below 50% for the first time in March 2026 as Google Gemini and Claude continued to draw users away.
That does not read like collapse. It reads like normalization. ChatGPT remains the most popular AI assistant worldwide with more than 1.1 billion monthly users, far ahead of Gemini at 662 million and Claude at 245 million. Even so, the balance of attention is spreading, and the biggest assistants are competing not just for downloads but for repeat use, time spent, and paid subscriptions.
The scale of the shift is visible in usage patterns. ChatGPT, DeepSeek and Google Gemini accounted for nearly 90% of total time spent across AI assistant apps in the first quarter of 2026, showing how concentrated the market still is even as competition widens. Sensor Tower also said ChatGPT became the fastest mobile app ever to reach 1 billion monthly active users in May 2026, hitting that milestone in three years and outpacing the pace set by TikTok, YouTube and Instagram.
At the same time, the broader category is expanding fast. Global time spent on generative AI apps is projected to more than double year over year, from 17.2 billion hours in the first half of 2025 to 36 billion hours in the first half of 2026. Global in-app purchase revenue from AI apps is expected to top $4 billion in the first half of 2026, a 36% increase from the second half of 2025. Oliver Yeh, Sensor Tower’s chief executive, said the figures show AI is reshaping how consumers discover, engage and spend. He added that apps featuring “AI” in their descriptions are on track to reach 10 billion global downloads in the first half of 2026 alone.
Claude’s rise suggests where some of that pressure is landing. Sensor Tower said Claude’s True Audience share in the United States has more than tripled, while its mobile average revenue per user rose from less than $0.50 in September 2025 to $2.76 in May 2026. That kind of jump points to a more mature phase of consumer AI, where rivals are building durable audiences through product differentiation, mobile reach and paid engagement, even as ChatGPT keeps the largest seat at the table.
This article was produced by Prism’s automated news system from verified source data, official records, and press releases, then run through automated quality and moderation checks before publishing. The system is built and supervised by the people who set the standards it runs under. Read our full AI policy.
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