ChatGPT vs Gemini Traffic Trend in 2025 Shows Why OpenAI Raised Code Red

While the AI race continues in Silicon Valley, ChatGPT and Gemini have emerged as two AI platforms which are a cut above the rest. OpenAI's AI chatbot was a pioneer in the space, and had the advantage of establishing itself in the market before anyone else had a chance. On the other hand, things went poorly for Google in the initial days (the Bard fiasco and the image generation controversy), but Gemini has also made a strong recovery. In 2025, website traffic data highlights that Google's AI is now eating into ChatGPT, likely owing to the former's strong distribution network.

ChatGPT vs Gemini Traffic Trend Spell a Potential Disaster for OpenAI

In a post on X (formerly known as Twitter), Similarweb shared the “generative AI website worldwide traffic share” data. The web traffic analytics platform revealed how the footfall for various AI websites changed over the course of the last 12 months, or the entirety of 2025. One of the biggest takeaways was the decline of ChatGPT's traffic share, which dropped from 86.7 percent to 64.5 percent.

During the same period, Gemini made quick headway, jumping from a meagre 5.7 percent to 21.5 percent share of the global traffic. Apart from them, Grok and DeepSeek, which were not even on the map before 2025, managed to capture 3.7 percent and 3.4 percent of the traffic share, respectively. Anthropic's Claude saw a marginal growth of 0.5 percent, whereas Microsoft's Copilot was near-stagnant with a drop of 0.4 percent.

However, these numbers only matters for OpenAI and Google, since both companies massively push their AI websites. All other platforms' primary access is elsewhere — Grok has strong integration with X, Claude primarily operates as an app, and Copilot is integrated across Windows and Microsoft 365 suite of products.

OpenAI losing nearly 20 percent of its web traffic in 12 months could be one of the reasons why CEO Sam Altman reportedly declared a code red to the employees in November 2025, keeping any non-ChatGPT projects on an indefinite halt. The declaration was made right after Google released Gemini 3 Pro, which significantly outperformed GPT-5.1 on most benchmarks. Later in December, OpenAI released GPT-5.2 AI model to even the playing field.

The concern is understandable. OpenAI cannot compete with Google's enormous resources and the massive distribution network it has built across its Workspace apps, Android, Search. The website was the only democratised space where both companies could go head-to-head. However, if individuals are migrating from ChatGPT to Gemini's website, Altman-led company needs to innovate, and fast.