The AI assistant landscape is fragmenting faster than most marketing strategies can keep up with. New data shows ChatGPT’s dominance slipping while rivals like Claude and Gemini gain real ground — and one search agency is telling brands to stop treating all AI platforms as one interchangeable channel.
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/ — The referral traffic flowing from AI assistants is no longer concentrated in a single dominant player. Gemini overtook Perplexity in January to become the second-largest source of AI referral traffic, according to an SE Ranking study that analyzed more than 100,000 websites. ChatGPT continues to lead the pack, but its share has declined from roughly 80 percent in 2025 to about 75 percent in 2026.
The shift in usage patterns among the assistants themselves is even more pronounced. Claude’s share of website visits across the major AI chatbots climbed from 2 percent to 9.6 percent in the 12 months ending August 2026, according to Similarweb, while ChatGPT’s share dropped from 78 percent to 57 percent during the same period.
Victorious, a search agency focused on AI search visibility for both B2B and B2C clients, sees this volatility as a permanent condition rather than a passing phase — and warns brands against treating every AI assistant as if they all operate the same way.
“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 resources evenly across every platform carries its own set of problems, Transon explains, because each platform ends up receiving too little attention to generate meaningful results.
“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 prioritizes Google’s various surfaces first, partly because many users cross-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 the second priority slot, he directs B2B companies toward Claude, or Microsoft Copilot in environments where buyers work inside Microsoft tools, while consumer brands should look 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 foundational work applies regardless of which AI platforms a business decides to emphasize. Victorious’ research shows that the brands AI assistants cite most frequently are the ones mentioned most often on external websites — a pattern that held across all eight AI platforms examined 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 easily parse as part of that foundational groundwork.
Transon explored platform selection in depth on episode 8 of The Search Signal, the agency’s podcast, including how to match a second platform to the specific 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
+1 415-621-9830
Visit us on social media:
LinkedIn
Instagram
YouTube
Why it matters: As AI assistants rapidly fragment into distinct ecosystems with different citation behaviors, brands that spread themselves thin across every platform risk being invisible everywhere. A focused strategy on two or three platforms — paired with consistent third-party mentions — offers the most reliable path to AI visibility in a landscape that is only going to keep shifting.
