Gemini, Claude Chip Away at ChatGPT's AI Dominance
Key insights
- Gemini's AI web visit share rose to 29.9% in May from 29.4% in April, with monthly daily active users also growing to 18.9% from 17.9%.
- Claude's visit share jumped a full percentage point month-over-month from 8.8% to 9.8%, with active users climbing from 2.5% to 2.9%.
- Claude generated roughly 80% of code merged into Anthropic's product codebase in May, signaling deep developer-side adoption beyond consumer web traffic.
Why this matters
Consistent month-over-month erosion of ChatGPT's web traffic share by both Gemini and Claude indicates the generative AI market is genuinely fragmenting rather than consolidating around a single dominant platform. Claude's 80% code contribution to Anthropic's own product codebase is the sharper signal for practitioners: it suggests AI-assisted development has crossed a threshold from supplementary tool to primary contributor at the model's own creator. Alphabet's approximately $920 million monthly compute commitment via SpaceX signals that infrastructure access, not model quality alone, will determine which players can sustain competitive offerings as demand scales toward the 100-gigawatt orbital compute targets SpaceX has set for 2028.
Summary
Gemini and Claude both grew their share of AI web traffic in May 2026, per BNP Paribas data cited by analyst Nick Jones, while ChatGPT held its dominant position but continued ceding ground.
Gemini visits climbed to 29.9% from 29.4% in April, with monthly daily active users rising to 18.9% from 17.9%. Claude's visit share pushed from 8.8% to 9.8%, and active users grew from 2.5% to 2.9% over the same period.
Essentially: (Alphabet/Gemini, Anthropic/Claude) are compressing OpenAI's traffic lead, with Claude posting the steeper monthly gain.
- Claude generated roughly 80% of code merged into Anthropic's own product codebase in May, a developer adoption signal beyond raw web visits.
- Alphabet committed approximately $920 million monthly to secure 200 megawatts of compute capacity via SpaceX, with Jones calling the deal strategically prudent.
With SpaceX targeting orbital AI compute satellites by 2028 at up to 100 gigawatts annually, the industry is already building infrastructure for an AI demand curve that dwarfs current capacity.
Potential risks and opportunities
Risks
- If SpaceX's orbital compute satellite deployment slips past its 2028 target, Alphabet's approximately $920 million monthly infrastructure commitment could face capacity shortfalls precisely when AI workload demand peaks.
- Claude's growing dominance of Anthropic's own code merges creates internal concentration risk: a model regression or safety incident could directly disrupt Anthropic's product development pipeline with no fallback at current contribution levels.
- As Gemini and Claude continue taking web visit share from ChatGPT, OpenAI faces mounting pressure to respond with aggressive pricing or capability moves, which could compress margins across the generative AI sector.
Opportunities
- Enterprise development tool vendors and IDE makers (VS Code, JetBrains integrations) stand to benefit from Claude's rising code-generation adoption, with Anthropic's own 80% code-merge rate serving as a credible third-party selling point.
- Compute infrastructure providers positioned between hyperscalers and SpaceX's orbital network could capture spillover demand as Alphabet's $920 million monthly bet and the 100-gigawatt 2028 target validate the scale of future AI infrastructure spending.
- BNP Paribas analyst Nick Jones's strategically prudent framing for Alphabet's compute investment, combined with reported Alphabet shares at $362.74, may attract buy-side attention to Alphabet from institutional investors benchmarking AI infrastructure exposure.
What we don't know yet
- ChatGPT's exact web visit share percentage in May is not disclosed in the BNP Paribas report excerpt, leaving the absolute competitive gap unquantified.
- Whether Claude's 80% code contribution to Anthropic's codebase reflects human-reviewed merges, fully automated commits, or some mix, and how quality or regression risk is tracked at that scale.
- Whether other frontier labs such as Meta or Mistral appear in the same BNP Paribas tracker, or whether the report covers only Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT.
Originally reported by benzinga.com
Read the original article →Original headline: BNP Paribas: Gemini Reaches 29.9% and Claude 9.8% of AI Web Traffic as ChatGPT Continues Losing Share