Business and economy·September 25, 2026, 17:54

Claude grows sharply: Website visits up 540 percent in a year

AI-generated and checked against the sources listed below.

Claude's website had about 950 million visits in August 2026, according to Similarweb. ChatGPT is still the biggest, but has lost share to both Claude and Google's Gemini.

Anthropic's AI assistant Claude has seen explosive growth online. According to the analytics firm Similarweb, Claude.ai had about 950 million visits in August 2026. A year earlier, the figure was 148 million, which corresponds to an increase of roughly 540 percent.

The number of unique visitors rose from 16.8 million to 111 million over the same period.

Market share: Claude up, ChatGPT down

Similarweb has measured how large a share of the traffic to six major AI sites each service gets. Claude's share rose from 2.0 to 9.6 percent in one year.

ChatGPT's share fell from 79.3 to 57.2 percent. ChatGPT is thus still by far the biggest, but its dominance has shrunk. Google's Gemini has grown from 9.8 to 26.5 percent.

The figures show that the market is moving from one clear leader to three major players: ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude.

What drove the growth?

According to the report, much of the growth came between January and April 2026. It coincides with several events: the launch of the Cowork tool in January, a Super Bowl ad on February 8, and a dispute with the US Department of Defense in February and March, in which Anthropic prevailed in court.

Similarweb can only show that the growth coincides with these events. It has not been proven that they are the cause.

Claude's mobile apps reached 157 million monthly active users, up from 9.1 million.

Almost no paid traffic

One notable figure is that only 0.46 percent of Claude's traffic came from paid sources such as ads. For ChatGPT, the figure is 3.5 percent. A full 73.6 percent of Claude's visits came directly, meaning people typed the address themselves or used a bookmark. Regular search accounted for 12.3 percent.

Caveats

The figures only measure visits to websites and apps. They say nothing about usage via the API, where other companies build Claude into their own products. Similarweb estimates that the API accounts for about 45 percent of Anthropic's revenue. In addition, these are estimates from an analytics firm, not figures from Anthropic itself.

For ordinary users, this means there is a real choice between several major AI assistants, and that ChatGPT is no longer the obvious default for everyone.