ChatGPT sends 80% of AI chatbot referrals; Gemini is the one climbing

The short answer

In September 2026 ChatGPT sent 80.5% of the clicks from AI chatbots to websites that Statcounter tracks, Gemini 10.9% and Perplexity 5.8%. Gemini has nearly quadrupled its share in a year while Perplexity’s has nearly halved. All chatbots together still sent only 0.4% of the search, social and chatbot referrals Statcounter recorded, against about 91% from search engines.

What do the September 2026 numbers show?

Statcounter measures which chatbot a visit came from when someone clicks a link in a chatbot and lands on one of the more than 1 million sites running its code. It is a share of referrals, so it shows who sends traffic to websites. It does not show who has the most users.

Chatbot	September 2025	September 2026	Change (points)
ChatGPT	81.12%	80.47%	-0.65
Google Gemini	2.82%	10.94%	+8.12
Perplexity	10.85%	5.84%	-5.01
Microsoft Copilot	4.04%	1.78%	-2.26
Claude	0.99%	0.95%	-0.04
DeepSeek	0.18%	0.02%	-0.16

ChatGPT’s share has barely moved over the year. The order behind it has changed completely.

How fast is Gemini climbing?

Gemini sent 2.31% of chatbot referrals in April 2025, the first month in Statcounter’s series. It reached 7.20% in January 2026 and passed Perplexity in March 2026 at 8.65%, which Statcounter announced in a press release on 2 April. It was 10.93% in August and 10.94% in September.

So the climb is real, but it was flat from August to September. One month is not a trend either way.

Statcounter’s CEO, Aodhan Cullen, linked Gemini’s rise in that April release to Google building it into Search, Android, Workspace and Chrome. That is his reading of the data. Statcounter’s numbers show the rise; they do not show its cause.

What happened to Perplexity?

Perplexity was the clear second source in April 2025 with 12.07%. It fell to 4.34% in August 2026, its lowest point in the series, and recovered slightly to 5.84% in September. That is less than half its peak.

Claude moved the other way and then back. It rose to 3.74% in June 2026 and was down to 0.95% by September, about where it stood a year earlier.

How small are AI referrals next to Google?

Very small. Statcounter’s search vs social vs AI chatbot series for September 2026 puts search engines at 91.01% of those referrals, social networks at 8.60% and all AI chatbots at 0.40%.

Within search, Google had 89.94% of search engine referrals in September 2026. Multiplying the two shares, our own arithmetic, gives Google about 82% of all the search, social and chatbot referrals Statcounter tracked. That is roughly 200 times what every chatbot combined sent. ChatGPT alone accounts for about 0.32%.

An independent dataset points the same way. SE Ranking’s June 2026 study of 101,574 websites in Google Analytics found AI platforms sent 0.32% of all website traffic from January to April 2026, and that Google sent 134 times as many visitors.

What are the limits of this data?

• Statcounter counts referrals only. A chatbot answer that satisfies the user without a click does not appear at all.
• Grok is missing because, Statcounter says, it does not pass referral data in its header.
• The sample is Statcounter’s own customer sites, more than 1 million of them and over 3 billion page views a month, and Statcounter does not weight it.
• Statcounter may revise its figures for 45 days after first publication, so September’s numbers can still move until mid-November.

What it means for you

1. Check your own analytics before you plan. Statcounter’s mix is a global average; your referral sources may differ.
2. Treat ChatGPT as the main AI referral source and Gemini as the one to watch. Perplexity is now a smaller share than it was a year ago.
3. Keep AI referrals in proportion. On this data Google search still sends around 200 times more visits, so the work that gets you found in Google comes first.
4. Track chatbot referrals as their own channel in analytics so changes show up month by month.