Microsoft may be losing the AI race already, unless the company has a secret in-house AI model up its sleeve to surprise the crowd. Windows Latest has observed that Copilot’s market share on the web is still over just one percent, while ChatGPT is at 64.5% and Gemini has bumped to 21%. Even Perplexity is doing better than Copilot with 2% share.
This data is based on the numbers shared by SimilarWeb, which is a digital data company that tracks ‘hits’ coming to websites. Since data only covers visits to websites, such as copilot.microsoft.com or chatgpt.com, we can’t tell how popular Copilot is on the desktop or mobile apps. However, I will not keep my expectations high.
Copilot’s market share on the web is just 1.1%
If you look at the last twelve-month market share in the AI space, Copilot went from 1.5% in January 2025 to just over 1.1% in January 2026. While Copilot was growing a little every month, it suddenly lost more users recently, and mathematically, this means Copilot has stayed flat in the last six months.
| Snapshot | ChatGPT | Gemini | DeepSeek | Grok | Perplexity | Claude | Copilot |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 12 Months Ago | 86.7% | 5.7% | – | – | 1.9% | 1.5% | 1.5% |
| 6 Months Ago | 78.6% | 8.6% | 4.8% | 2.1% | 1.6% | 1.5% | 1.1% |
| 3 Months Ago | 74.1% | 12.9% | 3.7% | 2.0% | 2.4% | 2.0% | 1.2% |
| 1 Month Ago | 68.0% | 18.2% | 3.9% | 2.9% | 2.1% | 2.0% | 1.2% |
| Today (Jan 2) | 64.5% | 21.5% | 3.7% | 3.4% | 2.0% | 2.0% | 1.1% |
So even while ChatGPT dropped (86.7% to 64.5%) and Gemini exploded (5.7% to 21.5%), Copilot didn’t meaningfully pick up the share that’s up for grabs.
Thanks to SimilarWeb, Windows Latest also obtained a detailed breakdown of how Copilot was growing on the web. As I mentioned, Copilot growth was positive for months and even hit a peak of +19% in the last week of September, but Windows Latest observed that it stayed low to mid-teens through November.
Fast forward to December 2025, Copilot usage dropped by 19%, while other tools were as popular as before. Copilot’s traffic is now lower than it was 12 weeks earlier.
Copilot had months of positive growth, but its market share still didn’t climb. That usually means one of two things. Either the whole category grew faster than Copilot, or Copilot’s gains were too small to matter because the base is tiny. Second, on January 2, 2026, Copilot is in the red camp with OpenAI (-22%), Perplexity (-27%), Claude (-14%), and DeepSeek (-11%), while Gemini (+49%) and Grok (+52%) are surging.
| 12wk Change | 8/1 | 8/15 | 8/29 | 9/12 | 9/26 | 10/10 | 10/24 | 11/7 | 11/21 | 12/5 | 12/19 | 1/2 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Openai | 4% | 5% | 4% | 3% | 5% | 5% | 3% | -2% | 1% | -4% | -8% | -22% |
| Gemini | 51% | 39% | 20% | 32% | 78% | 64% | 69% | 71% | 84% | 82% | 44% | 49% |
| Deepseek | -27% | -28% | -22% | -17% | -8% | -8% | 12% | 15% | 12% | 5% | -2% | -11% |
| Grok | 9% | 7% | 14% | 16% | 6% | -13% | 5% | 13% | 28% | 43% | 49% | 52% |
| Perplexity | 26% | 14% | 17% | 20% | 37% | 66% | 39% | 39% | 32% | 17% | 7% | -27% |
| Claude | 33% | 46% | 42% | 34% | 35% | 47% | 56% | 49% | 16% | 12% | 12% | -14% |
| Copilot | 6% | 0% | 11% | 12% | 19% | 15% | 13% | 12% | 16% | 7% | 0% | -19% |
| Meta | -22% | -21% | -21% | -21% | -15% | 102% | 82% | 73% | 79% | 109% | 98% | -3% |
| Huggingface | 3% | 12% | 3% | -6% | -4% | -14% | -12% | -18% | -10% | 4% | -1% | 8% |
| Manus | 25% | 2% | -11% | -19% | -14% | -23% | -17% | -16% | -2% | -1% | 1% | 12% |
In the last month, Grok went from 2.9% to 3.4%, while Copilot went from 1.2% to 1.1% (down 0.1 points). In one month, Grok added almost half of Copilot’s entire share. That’s neat.
We can’t tell how popular Copilot is on Windows 11
We cannot figure out how popular Copilot is on Windows 11 since Microsoft does not publish data. Moreover, you can’t even use the Microsoft Store to guess the numbers because the Store does not have ‘downloads’ or ‘install’ counts. Play Store discloses the download count, but Microsoft Store skips it.
Still, I compared Copilot’s Microsoft Store reviews count with those of ChatGPT, but sadly, my analysis does not really tell us the real story.
While ChatGPT has over 2,000 reviews in the Store, Copilot has more than 75,000. Does that mean more people use the Copilot Windows app than ChatGPT’s Windows app? I don’t think so.
First and foremost, Copilot might have more reviews because it’s installed by default on Windows. On the other hand, you need to manually install ChatGPT. Moreover, I’ve observed that OpenAI does not frequently nudge you to download the Windows 11 app, and it also arrived in the Microsoft Store much later than Copilot.
When you consider these factors, it becomes almost impossible to “guess” how popular Copilot is on Windows 11.
Microsoft’s silence makes it obvious that Copilot is not popular
Copilot is clearly not used by a lot of consumers. If Copilot were popular on Windows 11, Microsoft would have bragged about it.
You might have noticed how Microsoft never misses out on opportunities to highlight one billion active devices running Windows. Would it really not do it for Copilot if it were actually popular? I doubt.
Copilot is also integrated into Microsoft Edge, which has over 10% market share, but we can’t tell how many people use Copilot inside Edge’s sidebar.
Over to you: Do you use Copilot? If yes, how do you use Copilot? Web, Windows, or Android/iOS apps?
