The story analyzes how demand for LLMs distributes across AI labs and applications by combining usage-based data and traffic estimates, revealing the United States as the dominant source of consumer traffic and brand adoption driven by ChatGPT and Gemini, while China remains focused on API/programmatic usage.

OpenAI’s power index surged from around 17% in late 2025 to over 51% in early 2026 as traffic share rebounded, while Anthropic collapsed from a majority stake to a small fraction, and Google showed balanced growth across power, traffic, and token shares.

The study notes limitations, including biases in OpenRouter data, undercounting consumer usage, invisibility of BYOK in token data, and potential underrepresentation of private or enterprise usage in traffic estimates.

Chat-based applications dominate user traffic, with other categories remaining niche and fragmented.

China’s data shows a split: in late 2025 it accounted for most token activity but little traffic, versus early 2026 where token share fell while traffic stayed low, signaling a shift toward more balanced usage or changes in consumption patterns.

ChatGPT remains the leading application but is losing share to Google’s Gemini, which exhibits the most balanced and sustained growth across both consumer and API usage.

The analysis uses three signals—Similarweb traffic, OpenRouter token share, and a power index—to map apps to labs and categorize them into groups such as general-purpose chat, programming, developer platforms, search/answers, vision/multimodal, audio/speech, and gaming/interactive AI.

FAQ takeaways emphasize ChatGPT’s traffic dominance, OpenAI’s leading power index, and region-specific dynamics: the US dominates consumer traffic while China leans toward API-driven usage.

The United States accounts for roughly 85–90% of web traffic to AI apps, while China’s token share remains high relative to traffic due to API usage and BYOK data invisibility in some sources.

Traffic share for ChatGPT declined from about 72.5% in October 2025 to 60.5% in February 2026, while Gemini rose from 13.9% to 23.9%, signaling growing competition and market diversification.