ChatGPT Just Lost 20 Points Of AI Share In Six Months. If You Only Optimise For One Assistant, You Are Already Behind.

Six months. That is how long it took ChatGPT to go from owning 70% of AI prompts to owning half.

Not because people stopped using it. They did not. ChatGPT's visitation nearly doubled in a year. It happened because everybody else turned up. Gemini got bundled into everything Google touches. Claude got picked up by knowledge workers. And the pie got a lot bigger while ChatGPT's slice got thinner.

If your entire AI search plan is "get mentioned in ChatGPT", you just found out it covers half the field. This week's news is about that, plus Google quietly handing your shop a checkout button you never asked for, a proper experiment on what AI Mode does to clicks, and a UK regulator deciding AI assistants deserve a spot on your phone's choice screen.

Here is what moved and what you do about it.

1. ChatGPT dropped from 70% to 50% of AI prompts

Comscore published its Q2 2026 AI Intelligence Report on 22 September. It is panel data, not a vendor guessing from a sample of prompts, so it carries more weight than most of the charts doing the rounds on LinkedIn.

Other numbers worth keeping in your back pocket:

• 35% of US desktop users and 29% of mobile users visited an AI assistant in June 2026. In January 2025 it was 25% and 12%.
• ChatGPT hit 168 million desktop conversations in June and grew multiplatform visitation to 99 million, up from 59 million a year earlier. Share down, raw usage up.
• Gemini desktop conversations rose from 8 million to 89 million over the year.

Now the bit that should make you sit up. Comscore split "used as a source" from "actually cited". In lodging answers, Tripadvisor showed up as a source link in 61% of responses but as a visible citation in only 21%. Hotels.com went 50% to 18%. Booking.com went 33% to 9%.

Read that properly. The AI can read you, lean on you, build its answer out of your page, and still not put your name in front of the customer. Being crawled is not being credited. The answer has no page two, and it turns out it does not always have a byline either.

What to do

• Stop testing in one assistant. Run your ten money questions through ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude at minimum. Log whether you are named, not just linked. Our free AI visibility tracking method does this in a spreadsheet.
• Give Gemini real attention. It is now pulling 30% of prompts and it lives inside Android, Chrome and Workspace. We covered the specifics in the Gemini SEO guide.
• Write passages worth quoting by name. Specific numbers, a clear named source, a self-contained answer. Vague paragraphs get absorbed. Sharp ones get credited.

This is exactly the multi-assistant tracking sheet we hand members inside the Dojo, prompts and all. Most agencies bill it as a monthly "AI visibility report" and charge accordingly.

2. AI Overviews now sit on nearly 4 in 10 US desktop searches

Same Comscore report. Google desktop searches carrying an AI Overview went from 25.8% in July 2025 to 39.4% in June 2026. Bing searches with Copilot Search went from 11.8% to 17.3%.

Two things the doom merchants will skip over. First, Comscore measured presence, not clicks. It does not tell you how much traffic those Overviews cost anyone. Second, total US desktop search volume did not collapse. Comscore counted 77 billion searches in Q2 2026, up 8% on Q2 2024. People are still searching. The results page just answers more of it for them.

Search Engine Land also pulled out who gets cited inside those Overviews. For retail queries, YouTube appeared among the top cited sources in 23% of searches, Amazon 14%, Reddit 12%, Wikipedia 11%. YouTube topped entertainment, retail and financial services. Reddit sat near the top in every category.

That is source stacking in plain sight. The machine trusts everyone except you. If you sell anything and you have no YouTube presence, you are skipping the single most cited domain in retail AI Overviews. A two minute product walkthrough filmed on a phone beats a fifth blog post nobody asked for.

3. A real experiment on what AI Mode does to your clicks

Most "AI is killing traffic" claims are vibes and screenshots. This one is a randomised field experiment. Researchers took 1,100 US Chrome users, watched three days of normal searching, then randomly pushed some into AI Mode for seven days.

Satisfaction, usefulness and trust in Google all dropped too. The complaints were about control: fewer links, fewer sources, harder to get to a website.

Now the honest caveats, because we do not sell fear here. The sample skewed young and highly educated. It ran for one week. Before the test, AI Mode was just 0.6% of these people's searches. So this shows what happens if AI Mode becomes the default, not what happens today when people opt in.

It is still the clearest evidence yet of the direction of travel. When the answer is the page, fewer people leave it. Which means the prize is not the click. It is being the name inside the answer. Everything in the AEO playbook points at that sentence, not at position one.

4. AI Overviews may be linking out a lot more

Here is a counterweight. Malte Landwehr posted data from Peec AI showing the share of AI Overviews containing external links jumping from close to 0% to over 25%. Barry Schwartz shared it on Search Engine Roundtable while openly saying it did not "feel" right to him, and disclosed a small investment in Peec AI.

Treat it as one tool's data until others confirm it. But if it holds, those in-answer links are a fresh door in. And the pages that get linked are the ones with a clean, answer-first block the model can point at. Another reason to fix your intros this week.

5. Google just switched on checkout for your Shopify products. By default.

This one is urgent if you sell online. Google Merchant Center is emailing retailers whose platform supports Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), telling them their products are now eligible for native checkout in AI Mode and Gemini. Shopify has UCP built in, so Shopify stores matched to Merchant Center are being opted in.

The email says eligible products are automatically included. Nothing to set up. Which also means nothing you agreed to.

Is that good or bad? Depends on your business:

• Keep it on if you live on volume, your margins survive a Google hosted checkout, and you would rather catch the sale than argue about where it happens.
• Turn it off if repeat customers, email capture, upsells or your own checkout flow are where your profit sits. Per Google's email, you switch it off in your Shopify admin under Sales channels, then Agentic.

Either way, decide on purpose. Default settings are how you end up with a business model you did not choose.

6. The UK wants AI assistants on your phone's choice screen

Close to home for us up in the North East. On 23 September the Competition and Markets Authority strengthened its proposals for Android and Chrome in the UK. If approved, Google would have to:

• Show a choice of search services when someone first sets up an Android phone or opens Chrome, then prompt them every year to pick their default.
• Allow AI assistants onto those choice screens where they meet technical and security criteria.
• Make sure providers on the screens fairly attribute publisher content, so people can see where answers came from.

The CMA says it will make a final decision by 9 October. If it lands, UK users get a yearly nudge to try something other than Google, and AI assistants get a seat at that table. Combine that with Comscore's fragmentation numbers and the message is loud. The single-channel business is a sitting duck. If your local SEO only works on one Google results page, you are betting the house on a default that regulators are actively trying to loosen.

7. Rank Math adds Gemini to its AI visibility tracking

Rank Math launched Rank Math AI on 23 September, bundling Content AI, AI Link Genius and AI Visibility. The headline for you: AI Visibility now tracks brand mentions in Gemini as well as ChatGPT, with daily, weekly or monthly prompt monitoring in more than 30 languages.

Useful if you already run Rank Math on WordPress. But keep your head. The same week, Rand Fishkin posted his reasons for being sceptical of the whole AI tracking industry, starting with the fact that assistants give different answers every time you ask the same thing. He is right to push. A tracker that runs a prompt once and reports a "rank" is measuring noise. Run each prompt several times, look at how often you are named, and judge the trend, not a single day.

We teach the manual version of this inside the Dojo because it costs nothing and it tells you the truth. Tools make it faster. They do not make it more accurate.

8. The smaller stuff worth 30 seconds

• Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5. With Claude now at 11% of prompts per Comscore, it belongs on your test list.
• ChatGPT Voice can now switch to GPT 5.6 or GPT 6 Astra when a spoken question needs search or harder reasoning, per OpenAI's release notes. Voice answers name one or two businesses, not ten.
• Microsoft Clarity added page classification to its Bot Activity reporting, so you can see which kinds of pages the bots are hitting. Pair it with tracking AI referrals in GA4.

The fix order: what to do first

1. Shopify sellers: check Merchant Center today and make a deliberate call on native checkout.
2. Everyone: run your top ten buying questions through ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, three times each. Log named, linked, or missing.
3. Rewrite the intro of your five most important pages into a 40 to 60 word answer-first block.
4. Get onto the sources AI already cites: YouTube, Reddit threads, and the "best X in your town" lists. Our guide to getting into AI listicles is the fastest start.
5. Stop reporting rankings as your only win. Report mentions across assistants alongside them.

The big picture

Every story this week says the same thing in a different accent. AI search is splitting across more assistants. The answer box is getting bigger. Clicks are getting harder to earn. Regulators want even more choice on the screen. The people still optimising for one page of ten blue links on one search engine are defending a castle the tide is already inside.

The winners are the businesses that get named. Everywhere. By machines that trust other people's words about you more than your own.

You can do all of this yourself. It is just slower when you are working it out alone. Inside the Dojo you get the multi-assistant tracking sheet, the answer-first rewrite templates and the source stacking checklist, step by step, updated every week as this stuff moves. If you would rather have it handled, that is what Done For You is for.

Join The Dojo. $67/mo. Strike first.