Where People Are Searching With AI in 2026

For years, digital visibility was largely a Google problem.

If you ranked highly, customers could find you. If you didn't, they found someone else.

Today, that landscape is becoming far more fragmented.

Consumers are increasingly turning to AI platforms to research products, compare services and answer questions. Instead of one dominant search engine, businesses now need to consider visibility across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and a growing number of AI-powered experiences.

The challenge is that these platforms are not identical.

They attract different audiences, serve different use cases and surface information in different ways. Understanding those differences is becoming increasingly important for brands trying to measure and improve their AI visibility.

ChatGPT remains the market leader

Despite growing competition, ChatGPT remains the platform most people associate with AI search.

OpenAI's platform reached more than 900 million weekly active users in early 2026, making it by far the largest standalone AI assistant in the market. While competitors are growing quickly, ChatGPT continues to dominate both consumer awareness and overall usage.

What's particularly interesting is how people use it.

Research from Bain found prompt volume grew by almost 70% during the first half of 2025, while shopping-related prompts increased by 25% over the same period. Users are no longer treating ChatGPT as a novelty. They're using it for research, recommendations and purchase decisions.

For brands, ChatGPT is still the most important AI platform to monitor.

Not simply because it's the largest, but because it increasingly acts as a discovery engine.

Why people use ChatGPT

ChatGPT's strengths include:

• General research
• Product comparisons
• Content creation
• Brainstorming
• Professional workflows
• Coding and technical support

For many users, ChatGPT has become the default starting point for questions that would previously have gone to Google.

Interestingly, the free version appears to account for the vast majority of usage. While OpenAI has successfully built a large subscription business around ChatGPT Plus and enterprise products, hundreds of millions of users continue to interact primarily through the free experience. This means that for most brands, visibility within the standard ChatGPT experience remains more important than optimisation for premium users.

Gemini's biggest advantage is distribution

If ChatGPT dominates mindshare, Gemini dominates distribution.

Google has integrated Gemini across Search, Android, Workspace, Gmail, Docs and many of its other products. This gives Google a unique advantage: it can introduce AI experiences directly into products that billions of people already use every day.

That strategy appears to be working.

Multiple datasets show Gemini growing faster than almost every major competitor. Similarweb data suggests Gemini traffic grew roughly ninefold between late 2024 and early 2026, while other industry estimates place Gemini's user base between 350 million and 650 million users.

At the same time, Google AI Overviews now reach more than 2 billion users globally.

For brands, this matters because Gemini and AI Overviews are increasingly connected to traditional search behaviour.

Why people use Gemini

Gemini performs particularly well when users already live inside Google's ecosystem.

Common use cases include:

• Search enhancement
• Workspace productivity
• Email assistance
• Document creation
• Google ecosystem integration
• Mobile AI experiences

Unlike ChatGPT, which users often visit intentionally, Gemini frequently appears inside workflows users are already completing.

That creates a different visibility challenge.

Perplexity is becoming the research specialist

Perplexity remains significantly smaller than ChatGPT and Gemini, but it has carved out a distinct position in the market.

Rather than behaving like a chatbot first, Perplexity positions itself as an answer engine and research tool. Citations sit at the centre of the experience, making it particularly attractive for users who want to verify information and explore sources.

This approach has helped it build a highly engaged audience.

Industry estimates suggest Perplexity processes hundreds of millions of queries per month and continues to grow rapidly as users look for alternatives to traditional search.

For marketers, Perplexity is particularly interesting because citation visibility is often more transparent than on other platforms.

Why people use Perplexity

Perplexity's strengths include:

• Research
• Source verification
• Current events
• Market analysis
• Academic research
• Fact checking

Users often describe it as the closest experience to combining Google and ChatGPT into a single product.

For brands focused on thought leadership, expertise and authoritative content, Perplexity visibility can be particularly valuable.

Claude is growing faster than many people realise

While ChatGPT and Gemini dominate most discussions, Claude has quietly become one of the fastest-growing AI platforms.

Recent traffic analysis highlighted by Search Engine Journal found Claude generating significantly more referral traffic than many marketers expected, while broader industry reports show Claude's usage growing rapidly throughout 2025 and 2026.

Claude's growth has largely been driven by a reputation for high-quality writing, nuanced reasoning and strong performance on complex tasks.

Rather than competing directly on search, Claude has become particularly popular among professionals who need detailed analysis and long-form content support.

Why people use Claude

Claude is often preferred for:

• Long-form writing
• Strategy work
• Analysis
• Document review
• Research synthesis
• Complex reasoning tasks

This has made it especially popular among consultants, researchers, marketers and knowledge workers.

Although Claude's overall audience remains smaller than ChatGPT's, its user base tends to be highly engaged and professionally focused.

Most people don't use just one AI platform

One of the biggest misconceptions in AI search is that users choose a single winner.

Increasingly, they don't.

Recent research and user behaviour studies suggest that many AI users now move between multiple platforms depending on the task they're trying to complete. ChatGPT may be used for brainstorming, Perplexity for research, Claude for writing and Gemini for productivity tasks.

This trend has important implications for brands.

Visibility on one platform does not guarantee visibility on another.

Each system uses different retrieval methods, different source preferences and different approaches to generating responses. Research into Google AI Overviews found that nearly 30% of cited domains did not appear in the accompanying first-page search results, highlighting how differently AI systems can select information.

In other words, AI visibility is becoming fragmented.

The question isn't which platform wins

Many businesses are still asking which AI platform will dominate.

That may be the wrong question.

ChatGPT remains the largest standalone assistant. Gemini benefits from Google's enormous distribution network. Perplexity has become a trusted research tool. Claude continues attracting professionals who value high-quality analysis and writing.

Each platform is growing because it solves a different problem.

For brands, the challenge is no longer ranking in a single search engine. It's understanding how your business is represented across an increasingly complex ecosystem of AI-powered discovery platforms.

The companies that measure visibility across multiple AI systems will be far better positioned than those focusing on just one.

Because customers aren't choosing a single AI platform.

They're using all of them.

References

Search Engine Journal – Claude Is the Fastest-Growing AI Traffic Source Per New Data
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/claude-is-the-fastest-growing-ai-traffic-source-per-new-data/578669/

Bain & Company – How Customers Are Using AI Search
https://www.bain.com/insights/how-customers-are-using-ai-search/

Measuring Google AI Overviews: Activation, Source Quality, Claim Fidelity, and Publisher Impact
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14021

Similarweb – Gen AI Stats 2026
https://www.similarweb.com/blog/marketing/geo/gen-ai-stats/

TechCrunch – Google's AI Overviews Have 2 Billion Monthly Users
https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/23/googles-ai-overviews-have-2b-monthly-users-ai-mode-100m-in-the-us-and-india/