Key points
- How fast Anthropic's Claude gained session share
- Why Gemini still leads Claude on the web
- What Graphite's chatbot count leaves out
Anthropic's (ANT) Claude passed Google's (GOOGL) Gemini in monthly chatbot sessions in June, according to data in a report published on Nov. 9 by Graphite, a research and growth marketing firm. Graphite estimates that Claude had 5.44 billion worldwide web visits and mobile app sessions in September, compared with 3.72 billion for Gemini.
OpenAI's ChatGPT is still far ahead. Graphite estimates it had 61.35 billion sessions in September, or 81.2% of the total for the six chatbots in the report. No other chatbot reached 10%. The other three are Grok, Perplexity, and DeepSeek.
Graphite built the count from Similarweb estimates of web visits and mobile app sessions. A session is one stretch of use, so the figures measure how much people use each chatbot, not how many people use it.
The report came out as Anthropic began marketing its initial public offering. Bloomberg reported that the marketing to investors began on Nov. 9. We track every reported valuation figure on our Anthropic IPO valuation page.
Claude went from 0.5% of sessions to 7.2% in a year
A year ago, Claude had a tiny share of this count. It had 272 million sessions in September 2025, about 0.5% of the six chatbots' 55.3 billion, by Graphite's estimates. In September 2026, it had 5.44 billion of 75.5 billion, or 7.2%. Graphite puts Claude's growth over the year at 1,901%.
The jump started in February. Claude's worldwide sessions rose from 459 million in January to 1.82 billion in March, Graphite found. The firm says the surge appears to have come from three things: the launch of Claude Cowork, the release of the Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6 models, and Anthropic's widely publicized standoff with the Pentagon.
Gemini grew too. Its sessions rose 182% over the year, and they climbed 45% from January to May 2026. Since May, Gemini's worldwide sessions have slipped 2.8%, Graphite said. Claude passed Gemini in June, with 4.05 billion sessions to Gemini's 3.75 billion, and it's stayed ahead every month since.
Gemini still leads Claude on the web
The ranking depends on what you count. Graphite adds app sessions to web visits. On the web alone, Similarweb's August data put Gemini at 25.6% of AI chatbot visits and Claude at 9.3%, as we noted in October.
Counting people changes the order, too. In a consumer AI report published Oct. 5, Andreessen Horowitz said ChatGPT had a 2.5 times lead on Gemini and a 14 times lead on Claude in monthly active mobile users, using Sensor Tower data. On those numbers, Gemini's mobile audience was more than five times Claude's. The same report put ChatGPT about 2 times ahead of Gemini and 6 times ahead of Claude in August web visits.
Web visits and app sessions are also counted differently. Similarweb ends a web visit after 30 minutes without activity or at midnight, while an app session covers a period of active use, according to Graphite's methodology.
The six-chatbot count also leaves out Google's AI Mode, the chat feature inside Google Search. In the US, AI Mode had 491 million web visits in August, compared with 360 million US sessions for Gemini, Graphite found.
Graphite's data covers web and app sessions, so it leaves out companies and developers that reach Claude or Gemini through an API, a direct connection between their own software and the AI model. Graphite also says it has no reliable data source for desktop apps, including Claude's and ChatGPT's, so its count understates AI use on desktop. That matters for Claude, since Claude Cowork runs in Anthropic's desktop app.
ChatGPT is growing again
ChatGPT's sessions stalled from July 2025 through June 2026, then started rising again in July, Graphite found. September's 61.35 billion was a record for ChatGPT and up 24% from a year earlier.
ChatGPT lost about 1 percentage point of share a month from January to June 2026, then won back about 0.27 points a month from July to September.
Graphite's headline growth figure for this year covers all six chatbots combined, which rose 19% from 64 billion sessions in January to 76 billion in September. ChatGPT alone went from 55.31 billion to 61.35 billion over those months, an 11% gain. Measured from its February low of 51.27 billion, ChatGPT's sessions rose about 20%.
Over the year to September, the six chatbots added 20.2 billion monthly sessions. ChatGPT accounted for 58.9% of that growth, Claude for 26%, and Gemini for 12%, according to Graphite. Perplexity was the only one of the six to shrink, with sessions down 27%.
ChatGPT accounts for the largest share of AI referral visits, meaning visits that reach another website from a link in a chatbot. As of July 2026, it had 60% of AI referral traffic worldwide. Gemini had 14% and Claude had 10%. In the US, Claude edged out Gemini, 11% to 10%.
Anthropic hasn't filed a price range for its IPO yet. Its amended S-1 from Nov. 2 still leaves the range blank.
