The AI assistant landscape is no longer a one-horse race. New data shows ChatGPT’s dominance slipping while rivals like Claude and Gemini gain ground, forcing brands to rethink where they invest their optimization efforts. Search agency Victorious is now urging companies to stop treating all AI platforms as interchangeable and instead focus on the specific assistants their customers actually turn to.
Claude’s share of AI chatbot visits rose from 2% to 9.6% in a year. Victorious says target the assistants buyers use and build mentions that lift them all.
Third-party mentions are the only lever that moves every platform at once.”— Michael Transon, CEO, VictoriousSAN FRANCISCO, CA, UNITED STATES, October 16, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — AI referral traffic is spreading across more assistants. Gemini passed Perplexity in January to become the second-largest source of AI referral traffic, according to an SE Ranking study of more than 100,000 websites. ChatGPT still sends the most, though its share slipped from about 80 percent in 2025 to about 75 percent in 2026.
Usage of the assistants themselves is moving even faster. Claude’s share of website visits among the major AI chatbots rose from 2 percent to 9.6 percent in the 12 months through August 2026, according to Similarweb, while ChatGPT’s share fell from 78 percent to 57 percent.
Victorious, a search agency that works on AI search visibility for B2B and B2C companies, expects that volatility to continue, and cautions against treating every AI assistant as one channel with one playbook.
“We see marketers treating these platforms as if they’re all the same thing, and they are not,” said Michael Transon, CEO of Victorious. “Showing up in AI Overviews and AI Mode does not mean you’re going to show up in the Gemini app, even though it is all Google.”
Spreading effort evenly across every platform carries its own risk, according to Transon, because each one ends up with too little effort to move.
“Two or three platforms that are done really well are going to beat a scattershot approach that’s more difficult to execute on and also to measure,” he said.
Transon puts Google’s surfaces first, in part because many people check other assistants’ answers there. “Google search earns your attention twice,” he said. “Once to get its own AI answers, and then a second time as the place people go to verify all the other AI tools’ answers.”
For a second priority, he points B2B companies toward Claude, or Microsoft Copilot where buyers work inside Microsoft tools, and consumer brands toward ChatGPT. “Treat it as a hypothesis,” Transon said. “Pick your second platform, establish your baseline, put in the work, and then measure it for a quarter or two.”
Some of the work doesn’t depend on which AI platforms a business chooses to prioritize. Victorious’ research has found that the brands AI assistants name most often are the ones mentioned most often on other websites, a pattern that held across the eight AI platforms in its Q2 2026 Search Report.
“Third-party mentions are the only lever that moves every platform at once,” Transon said.
Victorious also counts clear, consistent company descriptions and pages that AI crawlers can read as part of that groundwork.
Transon covered platform selection in detail on episode 8 of The Search Signal, the agency’s podcast, including how to match a second platform to the sources each assistant tends to cite.
About Victorious
Victorious is a search agency founded in 2013 that helps brands grow their visibility in Google and AI search platforms including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews. The agency has been named Search Agency of the Year five times and is headquartered in San Francisco.
Jill Maldonado
Victorious
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Why it matters: As AI assistants fragment and user preferences shift rapidly, brands that cling to a single-platform strategy risk losing visibility where their buyers actually are. The data suggests that a focused, measurable approach on two or three key platforms—backed by consistent third-party mentions—will outperform a diluted, all-hands-on-deck effort in the long run.
