Google Gemini web traffic grows 28% in a month, ChatGPT sees a 5% dip

Gemini chatgpt

• Gemini's site traffic rose 28% in Dec 2025 post Gemini 3 launch.
• ChatGPT still leads with 5.5 billion visits, but Gemini is gaining momentum
• Google embeds Gemini in products, while ChatGPT relies on direct site visits

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The competition between Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT has officially moved out of product demos and into real user behavior, and the latest numbers show that the gap, while still large, is no longer unshakeable.

After Google rolled out its new Gemini 3 model in November 2025, the Gemini website started seeing a noticeable jump in visitors, as per similarweb. In December 2025 alone, traffic to Gemini’s official site grew by around 28 percent, while ChatGPT’s website traffic dropped by nearly 5.6 percent during the same time. The trend has caught the attention of the tech world because for the first time, Google’s AI is showing momentum that’s visible in public data.

Now, before we start writing ChatGPT’s obituary, a quick reality check. ChatGPT still leads by miles in total visits. December brought about 5.5 billion visits to ChatGPT, compared to 1.7 billion visits to Gemini. Other AI platforms like DeepSeek, Grok, Perplexity, Claude and a few others were nowhere close, each staying under 400 million visits. In other words, this is still very much a two-horse race.

What makes Gemini’s growth interesting is not just the spike but the strategy behind it. Google has embedded Gemini into its everyday products, Search, Android phones, Gmail, Docs, Sheets, even AI summaries in search results. This means users are interacting with Gemini in places they already live online, often without opening the Gemini website at all. ChatGPT, on the other hand, still relies heavily on people coming directly to chat.openai.com to use it. That difference in distribution is starting to show up in traffic charts.

Inside OpenAI, these trends have reportedly triggered a sense of urgency. There have been internal discussions described as “code red”, with teams shifting focus back to making ChatGPT smarter, faster and more reliable. Some planned experiments, including advertising campaigns for ChatGPT, were put on pause so that the company could double down on product improvements first.

So what does this mean for users? More innovation, clearly. ChatGPT still has a massive audience and strong loyalty, but Gemini is growing faster than any rival AI has managed to in the past year. The battle is no longer about who launched first or who sounds smarter on stage. It’s now about who fits better into people’s daily routines, who answers faster, who makes fewer mistakes, and who builds features people actually open their laptops or unlock their phones to use.

The AI rivalry is heating up, and 2026 may finally be the year when competition starts pushing both platforms to evolve even faster than they planned.