Similarweb has measured nearly every part of Anthropic's consumer business except the part that earns most of its money. A 66-page pre-IPO primer on the company, dated September 17, 2026, puts claude.ai at 950 million visits and 111 million unique visitors in August 2026, against 148 million and 16.8 million a year earlier, and the Claude mobile apps at 157 million monthly active users, up from 9.1 million. Almost none of that audience was bought.

In Short

Similarweb, a company that estimates how many people visit websites and use apps, studied Claude's website and apps before Anthropic's planned stock market listing and concluded they grew faster over the year to August 2026 than ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, Grok and Perplexity. It matters because nearly all of the new traffic came from people typing Claude's address or searching for it by name rather than from ads, and because many of the new users kept coming back months later. Investors and marketers now have outside usage data to set against Anthropic's own revenue claims, though the panel cannot see the API business that makes up close to half of reported revenue. The report carries two dates, September 17 on its cover and September 22 in its disclosures, and a handful of its figures do not match each other.

What the panel covers, and what it does not

The report, prepared for Similarweb's investor solutions business with principal data analyst Aria Ertefaie as lead analyst, carries two dates: September 17, 2026 on its cover and September 22, 2026 in the report details table of its disclosures. The document does not explain the difference.

Similarweb, which trades under the ticker SMWB, built the analysis from its Digital Intelligence and App Intelligence panels: worldwide desktop and mobile web data, monthly from September 2023 to August 2026, for claude.ai and five peers, plus summed Google Play and App Store readings for each product's app. Custom segments, named groups of URL paths for which the panel reports visits, unique users and share of site, track six claude.ai pages: the sign-up flow, plan upgrades, the usage-limit page, Claude Code on the web, the single sign-on callback and the download pages. A seventh counts conversation pages opened on chatgpt.com.

The boundaries matter as much as the readings. According to the methodology, the panel does not measure API token volume or pricing, enterprise contract values, Claude Code usage through the terminal, IDE, desktop and Slack clients, or traffic served through Amazon Bedrock or Google Vertex, which Similarweb describes as the largest reported revenue lines. Its six-site share of traffic is, in the report's words, "not a market-share figure". The gemini.google.com numbers exclude Gemini features inside Google Search and Workspace, leaving AI Mode outside the count; perplexity.ai excludes the Comet browser, grok.com excludes Grok inside X, and deepseek.com excludes third-party hosts of its open-weight models.

The bottom line, according to Similarweb, "is not an estimate, a valuation or a view on the IPO price". Similarweb holds no Anthropic securities and has received no investment-banking compensation from the company, its disclosures state, while Anthropic and the peers named "may be customers" of its data products. Revenue, run-rate, mix and valuation figures in the document are company statements relayed by the press, including CNBC and TechCrunch, and have not been verified by Similarweb.

A sixfold year, most of it in four months

According to Similarweb, claude.ai recorded 950 million visits in August 2026, up from 148 million a year earlier, and 111 million unique visitors, up from 16.8 million. Returning visitors rose to 82.5 million from 10.4 million. The Claude iOS and Android apps reached 157 million monthly active users, 17.1 times the year-earlier level, with 17.7 million downloads in the month against 1.8 million.

Most of the increase arrived in one stretch, as monthly visits went from 203 million in January 2026 to 824 million in April. Then the web line stopped climbing. Visits have held between 947 million and 969 million since May, peaking in July, and slipped 2% month on month in August. Growth since then has come from unique visitors, the apps and the developer and enterprise pages. Returning users made up 74% of unique visitors in August, against 62% a year earlier.

Engagement per user held through the expansion. claude.ai users averaged 8.6 visits a month and six minutes a visit, with a 27% bounce rate, and pages per visit rose to 4.26 from 3.88. chatgpt.com still leads on frequency, at 11.9 visits per user and 6.7 minutes, which Similarweb attributes to tenure: most chatgpt.com users have had the product since 2022 or 2023, most claude.ai users only since 2026.

Share taken, and from whom

Similarweb defines share as a site's visits divided by the combined visits of the six sites in a month. On that basis claude.ai held 9.6% in August 2026, up from 2.0% a year earlier. chatgpt.com fell to 57.2% from 79.3% as its visits declined 3.6% to 5.64 billion; its unique visitors fell 2.9%, so the lost share reflects lost users rather than lower frequency. gemini.google.com rose to 26.5% from 9.8% on 2.62 billion visits, up 262%. deepseek.com, grok.com and perplexity.ai all lost ground.

Those three smaller sites, the report argues, are the fair comparison, and each peaked early. deepseek.com hit 615 million visits in February 2025, the month after its chat opened. grok.com peaked at 326 million in March 2026. perplexity.ai, which out-drew claude.ai in every quarter through the fourth quarter of 2025, peaked at 219 million in October 2025 and has fallen 36% year on year to 95.2 million. claude.ai is now 2.7 times deepseek.com on visits, 4.5 times grok.com and 10 times perplexity.ai.

The conversation comparison adds a qualification. chatgpt.com's chats-opened segment ran at 4.21 billion visits in August, up 0.1% year on year, and has moved between 3.78 billion and 4.36 billion for fourteen months. Using total claude.ai visits as a proxy, claude.ai went from 3.5% of chatgpt.com's chat volume a year earlier to 22.6% in August. The gap is closing, Similarweb says, "because chatgpt.com stopped growing, not because claude.ai overtook it on volume."

The figures extend a run of Similarweb data PPC Land has followed through the year. In January, ChatGPT held 64.6% of worldwide generative AI website traffic and Claude 2.1%; by the June update, ChatGPT had fallen to 52.7% while Claude reached 8.9%. Those series include Microsoft Copilot and use different windows, so their percentages are not interchangeable with the six-site figures. Other panels point the same way on other units: Comscore measured Claude's US desktop unique visitors up 130.1% from February to March 2026, to 2.66 million, and Datos put Claude at 8.54% of US desktop AI tool users in March, from 3.58% in January. As PPC Land noted when OneLittleWeb published its AI tool traffic study, none of these measures is directly comparable with another.

Seven events and what each did to the curve

The report maps usage against seven dated events and identifies five of them as visible in both web and app data.

Claude Code on the web, opened on October 20, 2025, created a new segment that grew from 315,000 visits in its first month to 8.5 million from 2.1 million users in August 2026, while app usage stayed on trend, as Similarweb expected for a browser-based developer product.

Cowork, the desktop agent for non-coders Anthropic released as a research preview for Max subscribers on January 12, 2026, was the first release to register in every series at once. Download-page visits went from 171,000 in January to 11.3 million in March, SSO logins doubled in January and again in February, and app monthly active users rose 36% to 24.8 million.

The Super Bowl advertisement of February 8, 2026 followed Anthropic's pledge to keep Claude free of advertising, a campaign OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman attacked in a live interview three days before it aired. The response came mainly through the App Store: iOS monthly active users rose 37% and iOS downloads 59%, while sign-up flow visits rose 66% to 10.6 million with paid search under half a percent of visits. Similarweb reads the split as the pattern of a television spot carrying an app-install message.

The Pentagon episode, dated in the report from February 26 to March 5, 2026, produced the largest month for new users in the series. Anthropic refused to remove restrictions on mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons from its military contracts, was designated a supply chain risk and later won a court order blocking the blacklisting. Claude reached number one on the US App Store on March 1. March visits rose 2.1 times to 614 million, with 36.5 million new users, and app monthly active users rose 2.2 times to 55.1 million. "News spikes rarely retain; this one did," according to Similarweb.

Usage limit changes followed: an off-peak doubling from March 13 to 28 and a permanent doubling of Claude Code limits on May 6. App monthly active users rose 32% in May to 102 million and 18% in June to 120 million.

The summer releases, Fable 5 and Mythos 5 on June 9, Sonnet 5 on June 30, Cowork on web and mobile on July 7 and Opus 5 as the default on July 24, showed more in developer and enterprise pages than in consumer sign-ups. Visits peaked at 969 million in July, Claude Code web rose 48% month on month to 6.5 million and SSO logins 41% to 3.1 million, while sign-ups eased to 22.8 million from April's 28.8 million. The report's calendar omits that Anthropic suspended access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 from June 12 to comply with US Department of Commerce export controls, and began restoring it on July 1 after the controls were lifted on June 30, according to Anthropic. The June readings therefore cover weeks in which the newest models were unavailable.

The August releases, a self-hosted Claude Code beta on August 6, cross-surface memory on August 25, Claude in Chrome on August 26 and Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1 on September 1, coincided with new highs in every series except web visits. Claude in Chrome had first appeared as a research preview for 1,000 Max subscribers in August 2025. Similarweb says it would read Claude Code web above 9 million visits, with app monthly active users above 165 million, as the trend extending into September.

Sign-ups, upgrades and the quota page

The sign-up flow drew 21.4 million visits from 12.0 million unique users in August, up 504% and 419% year on year. That is five times the second-half 2025 average of 4.2 million a month, from which Similarweb concludes that the February and March events raised the monthly rate of new accounts rather than pulling sign-ups forward. The segment's share of site visits fell from 3.86% at its March peak to 2.25% as returning users came to dominate.

The upgrade pages, where free users see the Pro, Max and Team plans and paying users change tier, drew 21.0 million visits from 14.7 million users, up 400% and 476%. Users held at 77% of their April peak, visits at 69%. Anthropic said in March 2026 that paid subscriptions had more than doubled since January, according to the report; the panel shows upgrade-page users up 3.5 times from January to August. Similarweb says the readings agree on direction and goes no further.

The usage-limit page, where users check how much of their five-hour and weekly quota remains, is the report's friction gauge. It drew 52.1 million visits from 9.2 million users in August, 5.5% of site visits, after a series high of 68.3 million and 7.0% in July; a year earlier it drew 6,000 visits. Its share fell each time limits rose and climbed back when they bound: 6.7% in February, 5.3% in March, 6.9% in April, 5.7% in May and June. Each limit-hitting user checked 5.6 times in August against 4.8 in October 2025, concentration that Similarweb places among heavy users, "which is where we would expect paid conversion to come from". The report treats the series as both demand for paid tiers and a cost to users, and concedes the two are hard to separate. The Max plan, introduced in April 2025 with up to 20 times the usage of Pro, sits at the top of that ladder.

Download pages, which Cowork lifted to a 12.3 million peak in April, read 6.8 million visits in August, eleven times the August 2025 level; Similarweb attributes the decline to Cowork's move to web and mobile. Across consumer pages, August readings sit 26% to 45% below April peaks.

Developers and enterprise seats

Similarweb calls the Claude Code web segment "the best single indicator of the developer business" in its data, and the least complete, since it captures only the browser version. August's 8.5 million visits came at 4.1 visits per user, against 2.5 in October 2025, and the segment has grown every month since May. Press estimates cited in the report put Claude Code at about 10% of revenue in July 2026.

The SSO callback, the page a user reaches after authenticating through a corporate identity provider, appears mostly for Team and Enterprise seats configured for single sign-on, according to Similarweb. It ran at 3.5 million visits from 1.5 million users in August, against 21,000 visits a year earlier, and has risen every month since January, with the largest steps in March, at 3.1 times, and April, at 1.6 times. okta.com referrals rose 145% in June to August against the prior three months, and referrals from identity-verification vendor inquiry.withpersona.com rose 574%. The report cites a company statement that customers spending more than $1 million a year doubled to over 1,000 in early 2026. The SSO series, Similarweb cautions, "measures seats logging in, however, and says nothing about contract value."

Consumer pages peaked in April; business pages have risen every month since May and set highs in August. Similarweb reads that as usage shifting toward developers and enterprise seats, which is how Anthropic describes its revenue mix.

Retention: the reading Similarweb weights most

The report calls cohort retention "the single most useful reading" in its data, and the definition is strict: a user counts toward month three only if active in each of the three months after the cohort's start month, and a skipped month removes the user for good.

On that basis claude.ai's M1 retention, the share of new users still active a month later, rose from 57.5% for the December 2024 cohort to 71.4% for July 2026. M6 retention rose from 25.3% to 44.8% for the February 2026 cohort, a series high. The March 2026 cohort, the largest at 36.5 million new users, read 72.8% at M1, 52.6% at M3 and 42.6% at M5. Cohorts recruited in a traffic spike usually retain worse than existing users; these retained better.

chatgpt.com still retains more. Its M1 has held between 83.0% and 86.2% across every cohort, while its M6 slipped from 63.6% for December 2024 to 58.8% for February 2026. The gap between the two sites narrowed from 25.5 points to 11.8 at M1 and from 38.3 points to 14.0 at M6.

perplexity.ai moved the other way, with M1 falling from 59.7% to 49.5% and M6 from 27.0% to 19.6%. Its October 2025 cohort, recruited in its peak month with paid social contributing 1.5 million visits, retained worst of all at 42.7% at M1 and 13.6% at M6. Users who churn that quickly are, in the report's view, what advertising-recruited cohorts look like. Similarweb's explanation for the divergence is product type: many new Claude users came for Claude Code, Cowork and the desktop app, which are used repeatedly, while Perplexity competes in answer search, where Google, ChatGPT and Gemini offer the same function.

Android install retention points the same way. Claude's day-30 retention rose from 4.5% for the March 2025 install cohort to 13.0% for July 2026, while ChatGPT's stayed between 23.4% and 30.1%. The first real test of the web cohorts, according to Similarweb, comes in the September and October readings, when the March and April cohorts reach month six.

Fewer shared users, with one exception

In August 2026, 61.4% of claude.ai users also used chatgpt.com, down from a 77.9% peak in April 2025, while 14.4% of chatgpt.com users also used claude.ai, up from 2.4% in August 2024. The shared audience still grew in absolute terms, from 6.1 million to 68.2 million, but claude.ai counted 42.8 million users in August who did not visit chatgpt.com that month, against 2.5 million two years earlier.

Gemini is the exception. The share of claude.ai users who also used gemini.google.com rose from 29.3% to 40.3% over two years, and Similarweb names Gemini, not chatgpt.com, as the peer whose overlap it would watch. The smaller sites follow the ChatGPT pattern. When deepseek.com opened in January 2025, 40% of Claude's roughly 10 million users tried it; that share is now 5.9%, while 16.7% of DeepSeek's users also use Claude. A quarter of Grok's users and 35% of Perplexity's now do too.

Direct, branded and almost nothing bought

For marketers, the acquisition data is the most unusual part of the report. In July and August 2026 combined, direct visits accounted for 73.6% of claude.ai traffic, organic search 12.3%, organic social 5.0%, referrals 4.0%, visits sent by other AI assistants 2.6% and email 2.0%. Paid search, display, paid social and affiliates together came to under 0.5%.

The three owned channels, direct, organic search and email, held between 87.9% and 90.6% of visits in each of the six quarters from the second quarter of 2025. Paid sources combined peaked at 1.33% of visits in the fourth quarter of 2025, before the February to April increase, and fell to 0.43% in the second quarter of 2026. Paid social stood at 0.01%. Similarweb notes that paid search and display growth rates rest on small bases, under 1 million visits a quarter through 2025.

The peer comparison gives the figure its weight. In August 2026, paid sources accounted for 0.46% of claude.ai visits, against 3.5% at chatgpt.com, 6.8% at gemini.google.com, 1.2% at grok.com and 0.57% at perplexity.ai, which spent into its October 2025 peak. Only deepseek.com sat lower, at 0.16%. chatgpt.com's paid share rose as its visits stopped growing, and the methodology notes a move to paid acquisition from the fourth quarter of 2025. The report puts the contrast in one line: "chatgpt.com has started paying for traffic; claude.ai has not needed to."

Search data tells the same story from the keyword side. Search engines sent 79.7 million clicks to claude.ai in August, 97.9% of them on branded terms; "claude" and "claude ai" alone made up 77% of search clicks over June to August, and "claude code" drew 3.4 million clicks as a branded term in its own right. The largest non-branded term, "cloud", is a homophone of the brand, and competitor names such as grok and gemini also appear, which the report reads as users searching for a rival and clicking Claude. Paid clicks were 5.3% of search clicks in the keyword panel, a figure measured differently from the channel panel and not reconciled with it.

Referrals show where developers and partners enter. Over June to August, claude.com, Anthropic's marketing and account domain, supplied 63.4% of referral visits, and github.com sent 7.7 million, up 15%. Partner integrations sent smaller volumes, including shopify.com at 1.3 million, canva.com at 1.1 million and cloudflare.com at 787,000. Visits referred by other AI assistants reached 25.6 million in August, 6.9 times the year-earlier level; chatgpt.com's equivalent channel is larger in absolute terms but smaller relative to its size, at 1.52% of visits. Similarweb concludes that the 2026 growth did not come from referrals by other models. Email grew fastest, up 920%, which the report ties to account emails and usage notices sent to a user base six times larger.

Mobile: third of six, and closing on ChatGPT

The Claude app grew faster than the website. Its 157 million monthly active users made up 8.6% of the six-app total in August, against 0.8% a year earlier, and it passed the DeepSeek, Grok and Perplexity apps between April and July 2026. ChatGPT's app remains far larger at 1.06 billion, up 21%, and Gemini's reached 340 million, up 341%. ChatGPT's lead over Claude on mobile narrowed to 6.8 times, from 96 times a year earlier; Similarweb notes that ChatGPT's remaining scale lead now sits on mobile, where its app still grows while its web traffic declines. Claude recorded 17.7 million downloads in August, against 145 million for ChatGPT and 34.5 million for Gemini.

Android accounted for 116 million of Claude's monthly active users and iOS for 40.1 million, or 26%. iOS usage, where the Super Bowl and Pentagon effects were most visible, rose from 3.9 million in January 2026 to 40.1 million in August, while Android downloads set a high of 11.3 million.

Where the users are

Between June and August 2026, the United States accounted for 23.4% of claude.ai visits, down from 26.9% a year earlier, and India for 10.6%, up from 7.6%. The United Kingdom followed at 4.4%, Indonesia 4.0%, Japan 3.4%, France 3.3% and Germany 3.1%, with France and Germany both up from 2.4%. The top five countries account for 45.8% of visits. US unique visitors grew 7.6 times from March 2025 to August 2026, to 22.4 million, and India's 9.8 times, to 13.1 million, leaving the country mix close to chatgpt.com's.

The revenue cross-check

The report sets reported figures beside panel readings. Anthropic's annualised revenue, as told to investors and the press, went from about $9 billion at the end of 2025 to $14 billion in February 2026, about $19 billion in March, $30 billion in April, $47 billion in May and $65 billion at the end of July, a 7.2-fold rise. Over the same months claude.ai visits rose 5.6 times, unique visitors 4.9 times and app monthly active users 8.9 times, with the same February to April step. Second-quarter 2026 revenue was reported above $11.5 billion, against about $787 million a year earlier, with a first positive adjusted operating result of about $559 million, attributed in part to a compute resale arrangement.

A year earlier, Anthropic closed a $13 billion Series F at a $183 billion valuation, with run-rate revenue then just over $5 billion. The report lists a Series G in February 2026 at $380 billion post-money and a Series H on May 28, 2026 at $965 billion on a $65 billion raise. Press reports since June have put a possible offering value at $1 trillion to $2 trillion and the raise at $60 billion or more, above Saudi Aramco's $29.4 billion in 2019. A draft S-1 was submitted confidentially on June 1, 2026, with no share count, price or date set. On the $65 billion run rate, $965 billion is about 15 times revenue and $2 trillion about 31 times.

The mix is where the panel runs out. Press estimates for July 2026 put the API at about 45% of revenue, enterprise contracts at 35%, Claude Code at 10%, consumer Pro and Max at 8% and Team at 2%. The panel sees the consumer, Team and Claude Code lines directly, about 20% of revenue, and enterprise only through login and identity-provider proxies. The API it does not see at all. Similarweb's summary: "the panel corroborates the reported figures and cannot audit them."

OpenAI, the benchmark, was reported at a $40 billion run rate and a valuation of about $852 billion in March 2026, and has also filed confidentially, according to the report, following May reports that it was preparing a listing. In the report's framing, ChatGPT is growing on mobile and flat to down on the web, while claude.ai grew on both.

Figures in the report that do not reconcile

Several numbers in the document conflict with others in the same document. The first is the date: September 17, 2026 on the cover, September 22, 2026 in the report details table.

The second concerns app growth since March. The dashboard and conclusion describe Claude app monthly active users as up about four times since March, and the conclusion sets that figure beside year-on-year multiples of 4.4 times for Gemini's app and 1.2 times for ChatGPT's. The report's own March 2026 reading, however, is 55.1 million, which puts August's 157 million at about 2.8 times the March level. The four-times description matches the report's figures for Claude Code web and SSO logins, not for the app.

The third concerns chatgpt.com's paid share a year earlier. The text beside the paid-channel chart says it rose from 2.1% in August 2025 to 3.5% in August 2026; the takeaway box on the same page says it rose to 3.5% from 1.2%. The panel snapshot elsewhere gives claude.ai's own August 2025 paid share as 1.22%, which may be the source of the lower figure.

The fourth sits in the retention comparison with Perplexity. The text states that for the first cohorts Claude's M6 was 27.3% against Perplexity's 28.7%. The cohort tables give 25.3% for claude.ai and 27.0% for perplexity.ai for the December 2024 cohort. None of the four changes the direction of a finding.

What the data means for advertisers and publishers

The fastest-growing assistant in this panel carries no advertising. Anthropic committed in February that Claude would stay ad-free across all tiers, while OpenAI moved the other way: its ChatGPT ad pilot passed $100 million in annualised revenue within six weeks, and Similarweb's July report put ad penetration at 26% of US desktop ChatGPT chats in June. The primer shows the ad-carrying site losing web share while buying a growing portion of its traffic, and the ad-free one gaining share through direct and branded visits. Rory Sutherland's argument that ad-funded AI will repeat Google's worst mistakes now has a usage dataset on one side of it, though traffic data says nothing about whether advertising affects trust.

For media buyers, the question is inventory. Usage that moves to Claude carries no sponsored placement. On the six-site web data, the ad-free site gained 7.6 points of share in a year while chatgpt.com's visits fell 3.6%, although the ChatGPT app, where most of OpenAI's scale now sits, still grew 21%. Claude's own demand, meanwhile, is concentrated in branded search, a pattern that echoes a separate Similarweb study in which brands recommended by ChatGPT were 2.5 times more likely to receive a site visit within seven days.

Publishers face a narrower question. The primer measures traffic into claude.ai, not traffic Claude sends out, so a larger and stickier audience inside an assistant that sells no placements remains an audience whose outbound clicks this report does not describe. And the source of all of it is a vendor with a stake in the category: Similarweb sells the panels, invites readers to reproduce the analysis on its data and discloses that the companies it measured may be customers.

What Similarweb will watch before a listing

The report lists six data points for the growth case and six against, noting that the supporting ones are more recent and the ones against more lasting: chatgpt.com's scale lead, the non-recurrence of the Super Bowl and Pentagon events, and the unmeasured API business. New-user counts have already fallen to 28.5 million in August from 36.5 million in March.

Its watch list sets thresholds. Unique visitors and app users would weaken the case if they turn down with visits or if app growth slows below 5% a month. Claude Code web and SSO logins would weaken it by breaking their monthly rising streaks. A usage-limit share back above 7% with rising frequency would signal quotas binding on retained users. Sign-ups falling toward about 4 million a month, overlap with chatgpt.com rising back above 70%, or M6 retention dropping below 40% when the March cohort reaches month six would each cut against the case. Whether the business pages can carry the curve is a question the September data will begin to answer, and the S-1 will have to finish.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Similarweb, the web and app analytics company listed as SMWB, through its investor solutions business, with principal data analyst Aria Ertefaie as lead analyst. The subject is Anthropic PBC and its claude.ai website and Claude apps, measured against chatgpt.com, gemini.google.com, deepseek.com, grok.com and perplexity.ai and their apps.

What: A 66-page pre-IPO primer concluding that claude.ai reached 950 million visits and 111 million unique visitors in August 2026, that the Claude apps reached 157 million monthly active users, that six-month retention for new users rose to 44.8% from 25.3%, that claude.ai's share of six-site traffic rose to 9.6% from 2.0%, and that paid sources supplied under half a percent of visits. The panel does not measure the API business, which press estimates put at about 45% of revenue, and several figures in the report do not reconcile with each other.

When: The report is dated September 17, 2026 on its cover and September 22, 2026 in its disclosures, with data running monthly through August 2026. Most of the growth came between January and April 2026, around the Cowork release, the February 8 Super Bowl advertisement and the Pentagon episode of February 26 to March 5.

Where: Worldwide web and app panels covering desktop and mobile web plus Google Play and the App Store. The United States supplied 23.4% of claude.ai visits between June and August 2026 and India 10.6%, with no other country above 5%.

Why: The report tests whether the growth Anthropic has described to investors ahead of a planned listing is visible in third-party usage data. For the marketing community, it documents an assistant without advertising gaining share mainly through direct and branded visits while the largest ad-carrying assistant loses web share and buys more of its traffic, with consequences for conversational ad inventory, branded search and AI referral measurement.