AI chatbot usage is rapidly fragmentizing beyond ChatGPT, as overall usage expands this year, according to a new record from Comscore.
ChatGPT’s share of prompt quantity dropped from 70 % to 50 % between January and June 2026, according to Comscore’s Q 2 2026 AI Intelligence Report, released today, while competitors like Gemini and Claude rapidly pushed on. Comscore used its opt-in panel information to conduct the research study, with a participant base running between 500, 000 and 1 million individuals.
Gemini’s share nearly increased from 17 % to 30 %, and Claude climbed from 2 % to 11 % over the exact same duration.
That shift does not imply AI chatbot usage is diminishing. Instead, as overall use grows, the share of motivates is being spread across a bigger series of AI systems as the general pie expands, discussed Smriti Sharma, Comscore’s primary analytics and innovation police officer. For authors and marketing experts, that means generative engine optimization (GEO) strategies have to develop right into a multi-platform strategy, tracking performance throughout ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and others instead of just optimizing for a single aide.
“Publishers must quit asking ‘how do we turn up in ChatGPT’ and start asking ‘where is our target market really asking concerns, and are we turning up there.’ That implies measuring visibility per aide and weighting it by where your visitors are,” stated Michael King, founder and chief executive officer of a material advertising and SEO firm iPullRank. “The fundamentals that obtain you cited are greatly the same across every one of them, so a durable method is improved those as opposed to on chasing after whichever aide is winning this quarter.”
The fragmentation isn’t just happening in standalone aides. Google’s AI Overviews recaps in search are likewise ending up being a larger part of exactly how people get answers, Comscore located. Google desktop searches with an AI Overview expanded from 25 8 % in July 2025 to 39 4 % in June 2026 That need to be concerning for authors: the more searches that set off AI Overviews, the even more possibilities Google has to address individuals’ inquiries directly on the search results page, further damaging away at publishers’ Google search recommendation traffic.
On the other hand, ChatGPT got to 168 million desktop computer discussions in June 2026 and grew its multiplatform visitation to 99 million from 59 million a year previously, per Comscore.
In June 2026, 35 % of desktop computer customers and 29 % of mobile customers visited an AI assistant overall, contrasted to 25 % and 12 %, specifically, in January 2025
“The message isn’t that ChatGPT is winning the race. The message is AI assistants collectively are ending up being a consumer actions layer, and consumers are creating various partnerships with different aides,” Sharma said.
Claude desktop computer discussions enhanced from 1 1 million in October 2025 to a high of almost 40 million in April 2026 Nonetheless, that development plateaued in the summertime to 22 3 million in June, though that’s still concerning 20 times the degrees in October 2025, according to Comscore.
For Gemini, desktop computer conversations climbed from 8 million to 89 million over the previous year.
“This is beginning to look like the early social media sites era, where audiences spread across platforms and every one developed its very own habits and its own user base. Gemini is growing due to the fact that it’s bundled right into Google, Android and Work space, so it’s grabbing mainstream users who never ever went looking for a chatbot. Claude is expanding amongst expertise employees and technological target markets. Those are different people asking different inquiries,” King claimed.
The report likewise reveals a crucial distinction between brand names and publishers being used as an AI resource and actually being pointed out. Tripadvisor, for example, make up 61 % of travel sourcing by AI platforms– however just 21 % of citations.
“Being made use of by AI is not equivalent to being visible in AI. Standard SEO utilized to ask, ‘Did someone find my website?’ Right now, AI measurement increasingly asks, ‘Did the AI utilize me? Did they mention me? Did they suggest me, or did they mention my rivals rather?’ Even if you are being made use of as a solution in AI does not indicate that you show up,” Sharma stated.
This suggests AI exposure methods need to not only gauge when an AI design accesses a website, yet how commonly brand names and authors are cited across numerous AI platforms to determine influence.
“Access occurs in two stages. First the assistant extend into a bunch of sub-queries and draws in a broad set of web pages. That’s sourcing. After that the model manufactures and just connects citations to the handful of flows it straight leaned on,” King claimed. “For measurement, that implies citations alone are a lagging, incomplete statistics.”
Brand names and authors require to gauge the entire funnel, King stated, from retrieval to citation to referrals and profits.
“Initial data, certain numbers, clear self-contained passages, and solid entity signals– who created this, why they’re legitimate– are what get associated. And for publishers specifically, if you’re being sourced heavily however not cited, that’s utilize. It’s the greatest disagreement you have in a licensing conversation,” King said.
Publishers have actually already caught on to this. Business from Forbes to Time are using their prominence and citation prices throughout AI solution engines as a brand-new metric they are trying to generate income from with advertisers , though there still isn’t a regular way to determine AI visibility across systems. Publishers have actually additionally seen that being often mentioned does not constantly equate proportionally right into referral traffic.
“Clicks are no longer as essential as the influence that is taking place via the AI chatbots for the decision-making procedure,” Sharma said. “That’s why the citations, the source web links are coming to be a growing number of vital since it’s no more about the clicks. It has to do with … whether I’ve influenced ChatGPT or one more chatbot to provide [my brand] as a response.”
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