AI Assistants: ChatGPT Holds 79% Global Share, Gemini Trails

The global large language model (LLM) market is expanding rapidly, with ChatGPT maintaining a commanding lead among AI chatbot platforms even as Google Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, DeepSeek and other competing models continue to gain users and computing workloads.

The latest StatCounter data showed that ChatGPT accounted for 79.4 per cent of global AI chatbot market share in August 2026, far ahead of Google Gemini at 10.9 per cent. Perplexity followed with 4.31 per cent, Microsoft Copilot 2.79 per cent and Claude 2.57 per cent, while DeepSeek recorded 0.02 per cent. The figures measure AI chatbot market share through web usage and should not be interpreted as the entire global LLM market, particularly because enterprise and developer API usage is measured differently.

In Nigeria, ChatGPT also maintained a substantial lead, accounting for 75.72 per cent of AI chatbot market share in August, according to StatCounter. Gemini had 13.35 per cent, followed by Microsoft Copilot with 4.48 per cent, Claude at 3.73 per cent and Perplexity at 2.73 per cent. The figures indicate that while ChatGPT remains the most-used identifiable chatbot in the country, competing platforms have established measurable footholds in the Nigerian market.

Across Africa, the competition is similarly concentrated around a handful of platforms. ChatGPT held 72.75 per cent of AI chatbot market share in August, while Gemini accounted for 16.14 per cent, Copilot 4.9 per cent, Perplexity 3.24 per cent and Claude 2.94 per cent. An analysis based on StatCounter data also found that ChatGPT remained the leading chatbot in 192 of 198 countries, although its share declined in 172 countries over the preceding year, while Gemini recorded the largest increase in market share in 143 countries.

The changing competitive landscape becomes more pronounced when user engagement, rather than web traffic alone, is examined. Sensor Tower reported that global time spent on generative-AI applications was projected to rise from 17.2 billion hours in the first half of 2025 to 36 billion hours in the first half of 2026, representing more than a doubling within one year. ChatGPT also became the fastest mobile application to reach one billion monthly active users, achieving the milestone in May 2026.

Sensor Tower further found that ChatGPT, DeepSeek and Gemini together accounted for nearly 90 per cent of total time spent across AI-assistant applications in the first quarter of 2026. At the same time, ChatGPT’s share of unique users across mobile and web fell below 50 per cent for the first time in March 2026, showing that a dominant platform can continue growing in absolute users while losing a portion of the overall market to competitors.

The expansion of AI is not limited to consumer chatbots, as Stanford University’s 2026 AI Index reported that generative AI reached 53 per cent adoption within three years, faster than the personal computer or the internet reached comparable levels of adoption. The report also found that 88 per cent of surveyed organisations had adopted AI, while generative AI was being used in at least one business function by 70 per cent of organisations.

The economic value of generative AI is also increasing. Stanford estimated that US consumer surplus from generative AI reached $172 billion annually by early 2026, up from $112 billion a year earlier, representing a 54 per cent increase. At the same time, the cost of developing and operating frontier models is rising, with major cloud providers significantly increasing capital expenditure to build the computing infrastructure required for AI workloads.

Another measure illustrates why consumer chatbot rankings do not provide the complete picture of LLM competition. Vercel’s AI Gateway data for the three months ending September 18, 2026, showed DeepSeek accounting for 62.9 per cent of token volume among the leading labs on its platform, followed by Z.AI at 9.6 per cent, OpenAI at 7.7 per cent and Anthropic at 6.9 per cent. In terms of requests, however, DeepSeek accounted for 23.7 per cent, OpenAI 21.7 per cent, Google 13.5 per cent and Anthropic 8 per cent.

The spending figures tell a different story again. On the same Vercel AI Gateway measurement, Anthropic accounted for 42.6 per cent of spending, compared with OpenAI’s 22.6 per cent, Moonshot AI’s 10 per cent, DeepSeek’s 7.1 per cent and Google’s 7 per cent, which shows that token volume, number of requests and revenue or spending can produce substantially different rankings, partly because AI models differ in pricing and the kinds of workloads they handle.

Meanwhile, for Nigeria, the expanding LLM ecosystem presents both opportunities and challenges as businesses, developers, students, media organisations and public institutions increasingly integrate AI into everyday activities. While DataReportal estimates that more than one billion people globally use standalone AI tools each month, Wandit’s analysis found that about four in five active users of selected leading LLMs outside China use ChatGPT at least once a month, leaving a substantial user base for rivals such as Gemini, Claude, DeepSeek, Perplexity and Copilot.

Experts have stressed that the emerging picture is therefore not simply a contest over which chatbot has the largest user base, as the LLM market is developing across consumer applications, enterprise software, coding, AI agents, search, cloud services and developer APIs, with different platforms leading on different measurements.

However, for Nigeria, where ChatGPT currently accounts for more than three-quarters of measured AI chatbot share, the rapid growth of competing models suggests that the country’s AI market is likely to become increasingly diverse as access to affordable computing, broadband connectivity, local-language AI, and enterprise applications expands.