Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini: who actually uses each one — and why your store should care about all three

If you've seen one of our AI-readiness reports, you noticed we ask three different AI assistants about your store: Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini. A fair question is — why these three? Aren't they all the same thing?

They're not. They have different audiences, different strengths, and increasingly different roles in how people find and buy things. Here's the plain-English version.

The one-app era is over

A year ago you could be forgiven for treating "AI" and "ChatGPT" as synonyms — it held the large majority of AI assistant usage. That's no longer true. In 2026, industry trackers reported ChatGPT's share of AI assistant users slipping below half for the first time — not because it shrank (it's bigger than ever), but because the whole market grew faster than any one app. People now spread their AI use across several assistants, and a third or more of consumers say they start many searches with an AI tool instead of a search engine.

For a store owner, that has one blunt implication: being visible to one assistant isn't being visible. The audience has fragmented, and each assistant answers shoppers from its own knowledge.

Who uses which

ChatGPT — the biggest crowd, the general public. Around a billion people use it monthly; it's the default "ask the AI" app for the widest slice of consumers, across every age group and use case — from homework to trip planning to "what should I buy my dad who fly-fishes?" It's also the furthest along in shopping: it has native shopping features and already sends meaningful referral traffic to retailers. If a shopper's AI journey starts anywhere, odds are it starts here.

Gemini — the one people use without choosing it. Google's assistant reaches hundreds of millions of users largely through distribution: it's built into Android phones, Chrome, Google Workspace, and Google Search's AI answers, which reach billions. Many people "use Gemini" without ever downloading anything — they just ask their phone or see an AI answer on top of a search. That makes it the ambient assistant: the one woven into where people already are. For shopping, it matters because Google is still where an enormous share of product journeys begin.

Claude — smaller, but engaged and growing fast. Anthropic's assistant has a smaller consumer base than the other two, but it's been the fastest-growing of the set this year, skews toward younger and professional users, and its users spend unusually long per session. It's strong in work and research contexts — which increasingly includes considered purchases, where someone wants to reason through a decision rather than grab the first link. A smaller crowd, but an attentive one.

(There are others — Microsoft's Copilot rides Office into the enterprise, Meta's AI lives inside WhatsApp and Instagram, Perplexity serves search power-users. But these three cover the bulk of deliberate, ask-an-assistant consumer use today.)

Why this matters for your store

Each assistant answers shoppers from its own knowledge and its own sources. They crawl differently, they know different things, and they recommend differently. We see this constantly in the reports: a store that Gemini can describe accurately is invisible to ChatGPT; a brand ChatGPT recommends draws a blank from Claude. There is no single "AI" to be visible to — there are several, and your customers are spread across all of them, usually without knowing or caring which model is under the hood.

That's why the report checks all three, cold — no website handed over, no hints — the way a real shopper's assistant would encounter you. If one of them doesn't know your store exists, that's not a technical footnote. That's a growing slice of your potential customers getting "here are some other shops I'd suggest" instead of you.

What to do with this

The good news: you don't optimize for three assistants three different ways. They all feed on the same fundamentals — clear, complete, machine-readable product information; real policies; pages that answer a buyer's actual question. Fix those once and your visibility improves across all of them (we covered the specifics in why AI agents recommend some products and skip yours). The deeper step — giving every assistant's users a knowledgeable, on-brand conversation about your products — is the gap Sqrly exists to close.

But the starting point is simply knowing where you stand on each. That's the question your report answers on page one.

Sqrly helps online retailers show up — knowledgeably — for every shopper and every AI assistant. Join the waitlist.