KEY TAKEAWAYS
  • ChatGPT's referral share fell to a record-low 76.85% in April 2026, down from 84.21% just 12 months ago.
  • Google Gemini's share has nearly quadrupled year-on-year, climbing from 2.31% to 9%, its highest level on record.
  • Claude's April figure of 2.66% is nearly three times its January 2026 share of 0.92%, even after its March peak cooled.

If you've been watching the AI chatbot space closely, there’s a shift that’s been hard to miss. And now the latest numbers from Statcounter are starting to quantify it. 

ChatGPT's share of AI chatbot referrals to websites worldwide fell to 76.85% in April 2026, its lowest level on record. That's down 1.3 percentage points from March, down 7.36 points year over year, and the third consecutive month of decline.

Statcounter is an independent web analytics company tracking over 3 billion page views per month across more than 1 million websites globally. Its AI chatbot referral data counts something specific: every time a user clicks a link inside an AI chatbot and lands on an external website, that's a referral. Then, Statcounter records which chatbot sent it. 

The numbers are not total user numbers but a measure of which AI tools are actively driving real traffic to the web, which makes it a live, high-stakes signal for publishers, marketers, and anyone tracking how AI is changing the internet.

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