Google Gemini just saw a 46% spike in traffic – but ChatGPT still has the most loyal users (www.techradar.com)

Google’s Gemini saw a sharp traffic lift in September, jumping 46% to an estimated 1.1 billion visits (Similarweb), and increased its market share of AI-chat visits from ~9.1% a month ago to 13.7% by Oct. 3. That rise appears to be partly driven by backlash against ChatGPT’s new safety routing: OpenAI now switches sensitive or “distress” conversations to a special GPT‑5 Instant model to provide crisis support, a move some paid users say is overzealous and disruptive. ChatGPT’s overall traffic share fell from about 78% to 73.8% in the same interval, though it still dominated with roughly 5.9 billion visits in September and remained the only chatbot in the global top‑10 sites list. For the AI/ML community the story highlights two competing dynamics: growth through discovery vs. stickiness through loyalty. Similarweb finds ChatGPT has by far the most loyal audience (82.2% of its users don’t visit other GenAI sites), while Gemini’s audience is far more mixed (49.1% exclusive). The episode underscores technical trade‑offs teams face when deploying safety subsystems—sensitivity tuning for crisis detection (reducing false negatives) can produce false positives that disrupt user workflows and drive churn. In short, Gemini’s spike signals competitive momentum, but ChatGPT’s scale and retention remain substantial barriers to displacement; platform design choices around safety, UX and model routing will likely shape future market shifts.