AI Platform Personas: Why ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude Attract Completely Different Users

Claude users are 25 times more likely than the average Google searcher to visit university and college websites.

That one number, from Similarweb's 2026 Generative AI Landscape report, is enough to retire the idea that "AI users" are a single audience. 

The browsing data behind the report shows that ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini have each attracted a measurably different kind of person, with different interests, different session habits, and different reasons for opening the app.

Here, you will see who is on each platform, how they behave once they are there, why the two sets of evidence agree with each other, and how to use all of it to decide where your content and brand should show up.

AI Platform Personas

People do not pick an AI platform at random, so the platform itself tells you something about the person. ChatGPT's audience looks like the mainstream internet: food, health, fashion, sports, banking. 

Claude's audience clusters around work and study: universities, business services, programming, jobs, investing. Gemini's audience leans toward tech enthusiasts: graphics and web design, computer security, hardware, music, and games. 

They also talk to these tools differently, from Claude's longer working sessions to Gemini's quick in-and-out questions. If you plan around "AI" as one channel, you are averaging three audiences that barely resemble each other.

What the Website Affinity Index Measures

The report's Website Affinity Index compares the websites each AI platform's users visit against the browsing behavior of the average Google searcher, which is set to 100. 

So a score of 236 means that platform's users are about 2.4 times as likely as the average Google searcher to visit that type of website. The data covers worldwide desktop and mobile web behavior from June 2025 to May 2026.

Two things are worth keeping in mind when you read these numbers. First, affinity measures how over-represented a group is, not how big it is. 

A platform can have a huge affinity for a category and still be smaller overall than a rival. Second, the affinity numbers describe what people do on the wider web, not what they type into the chatbot. That is why the report pairs them with separate prompt behavior data, which we cover below.

Overall scale is a separate question. Generative AI platforms drew 9.5 billion average monthly web visits as of May 2026, up 70% year over year. Scale tells you which platform is biggest. Affinity tells you who is actually there.

The Three LLMs Platforms and  Personas

The report sorts the three major platforms into three clear personas. Here they are side by side with how each audience behaves.

Three things stand out before going platform by platform.

First, the categories barely overlap. ChatGPT's top affinities are food, health, and fashion. Claude's are education, business, and code. 

Gemini's are design tools, security, and hardware. These are not three slices of one audience at different intensities. They are three different audiences.

Second, the sizes of the signals differ wildly. ChatGPT's strongest signal is 2.4x. 

Claude's is 25x, roughly an order of magnitude beyond anything on the other two platforms. A very high affinity means a very concentrated audience, and concentration is what makes content targeting work.

Third, none of this shows up in traffic numbers alone, which is why a ranking of platforms by visits is not enough to plan around.

ChatGPT: An Audience That Looks Like The Mainstream Internet

ChatGPT's strongest signals have nothing to do with technology. Its users are 2.4x more likely than the average Google searcher to visit restaurant and delivery sites, 2.3x for health sites, and 2.1x for fashion and apparel, with sports at 1.6x and banking, credit, and lending at 1.3x.

Look at what is missing from that list: developer tools, SaaS, tech media. The categories where ChatGPT users stand out are the ones where everyone spends money and time: dinner, health, clothes, the game, the bank account. Three years in, the audience no longer looks like the early adopters who found it first. It looks like the market.

The report calls this persona Everyday Consumers. No single category dominates. 

Instead, there are moderate, broad lifts across the parts of life that define ordinary consumer behavior. In the source's phrase, ChatGPT has crossed the chasm: the niches have averaged out into the general population.

The strategic meaning cuts two ways. For consumer brands, ChatGPT is the mass channel. If you sell food delivery, healthcare services, apparel, or consumer banking, your buyers are disproportionately there, and users in those categories are already active shoppers on the platform. 

For niche and B2B brands, the same breadth is a dilution problem. Your specialist content competes with every consumer topic at once, so reach is high but the density of your specific buyer is lower than on the platform where that buyer concentrates.

So treat ChatGPT the way you treat broad-reach consumer media. Prioritize it if your category is on its high-affinity list, and measure your visibility there before assuming your audience is present.

Claude: The Professional and Student Platform

Where ChatGPT's interests spread across consumer life, Claude's collapse into one theme: career trajectory. Its users are 25x more likely than the average Google searcher to visit university and college sites. 

The supporting signals point the same way: business services at 3.0x, programming and developer software at 3.0x, jobs and employment at 2.7x, and investing at 1.4x.

A 25x score is a statistical oddity worth pausing on. Nothing else in the cross-platform dataset comes close. The next-strongest signal on any platform is Gemini's 4.8x for graphics and web design. A number like 25x is not casual usage. 

It describes a base where students, academics, and researchers are so over-represented that university browsing becomes the defining behavior of the platform.

Stack the rest of Claude's list on top, and the persona is coherent. Every top category maps to a stage of professional development: studying (universities), building skills (programming), working (business services), changing jobs (employment), and building wealth (investing). 

The report names this persona Professionals and Students. The source's reading is that Claude has attracted a mindset more than a demographic: people actively investing in their professional selves.

For marketers, the point is quality of audience versus scale. If your product touches education, developer tools, B2B services, recruiting, or personal finance for professionals, Claude offers the densest concentration of your buyer of any AI platform, even though its total traffic is smaller than ChatGPT's.

Finance makes the split concrete. Banking content over-indexes on ChatGPT at 1.3x, while investing over-indexes on Claude at 1.4x. 

Same industry, two platforms, two different customers: everyday account holders on one, active wealth-builders on the other. A bank marketing checking accounts and a brokerage marketing portfolios should not have the same AI platform priorities.

So if your buyer is defined by what they do for a living or what they are studying, weight your AI visibility efforts toward Claude and write for a reader in work mode.

Gemini: Tech Enthusiasts, Not the Google Mainstream

Gemini gives the most surprising result. The platform with arguably the widest distribution, wired into Google's ecosystem, has attracted the least mainstream audience. Its users over-index on graphics and web design (4.8x versus the average Google searcher), computer security (3.1x), and computer hardware (2.2x), with music at 1.5x and video games at 1.4x.

Notice the kind of interests. They are less about professional obligations than about technical passions: design tools, security, hardware, games. 

These are people who tinker and build for the enjoyment of it. Where Claude's audience is defined by career stage and ChatGPT's by everyday consumption, Gemini's is defined by enthusiasm.

The report calls this persona Tech Enthusiasts, and reads it as self-selection. Access to Gemini is effectively universal for anyone in the Google ecosystem, yet the people who adopt the standalone chatbot skew toward those who care about technology as an interest, not just a utility. Distribution put Gemini in front of everyone. Self-selection decided who stayed.

Two lessons follow. Gemini is a natural home for technical and creative content, such as tutorials, tool comparisons, hardware guides, design resources, and security material, which fit its audience in a way they do not fit ChatGPT's, where those categories index much lower. 

And distribution does not equal persona. Who a platform's owner can reach and who actually shows up are different groups, and only behavioral data tells you which is which.

If your content lives in the maker, builder, or gamer space, Gemini's audience over-indexes for you at 1.4x to 4.8x, so prioritize it above what its raw traffic share alone would suggest.

How People Actually Talk to Each Platform

If the affinity data tells us who uses each platform, prompt behavior tells us why. What makes this convincing is that the two datasets were measured independently, with no link between them, and they still point to the same three personas.

The report sorts AI tools into four modes of use. Claude and ChatGPT sit apart with long prompts and many turns, the signature of conversation: people thinking out loud, refining, and going back and forth. 

Perplexity sits in the middle, with moderately long prompts but fewer exchanges, which looks like research: ask, get an answer, move on. 

Gemini and Copilot cluster low, which suggests task-oriented, in-and-out use. Google's AI Mode sits closest to old search behavior, with short queries, quick answers, and minimal dialogue.

The prompt figures cited in the report's FAQ are based on US desktop data for June 2025 to May 2026, so keep that scope in mind when comparing them with the worldwide affinity numbers.

Now lay the personas over the behavior, and it explains itself.

1. Claude's professionals and students work in sessions, not queries: Nearly six exchanges per session at 17 words each is the rhythm of iterative work: drafting, debugging, refining, following up. The platform with the most work-defined audience shows the most work-shaped behavior.

2. Gemini's tech enthusiasts treat it like a faster search box: The most technical audience produces the shortest chatbot sessions, sitting closer to AI Mode's retrieval pattern than to Claude's collaboration. That fits an audience raised on Google-style search: get in, get the answer, get out, even when the tool can do more.

3. ChatGPT holds the middle at scale: Everyday consumers hold real conversations, nearly as long and deep as Claude's working sessions, but spread across the full breadth of consumer life instead of concentrating on work.

The content consequence is structural. Short-session platforms reward direct, easily extracted answers, because the reader wants one thing and leaves, which is exactly the behavior answer engine optimization is built for. Long-session platforms reward depth: comprehensive resources that still hold up after five or six follow-up questions.

How to Target Content by Platform

The two datasets combine into a repeatable check. For any content or visibility project, run it in two steps.

Step 1: Check Affinity. Which Platform's Users Over-index on Your Category?

Compare your vertical against the Website Affinity Index. If you are in restaurants, health, fashion, sports, or consumer banking, look to ChatGPT, where the lifts run from 1.3x to 2.4x. 

If you are in education, developer tools, B2B services, recruiting, or investing, look to Claude, with lifts from 1.4x to 25x. If you are in design, security, hardware, music, or gaming, look to Gemini, from 1.4x to 4.8x. When a category over-indexes on one platform, that platform gets priority, whatever the overall traffic ranking says.

Step 2: Check Behavior. What Kind of Session Does that Platform Reward?

Then match format to behavior. For Gemini or AI Mode users, who average 2.2 to 2.8 prompts per session, lead with direct, extractable answers, because you get one shot per session. 

For Claude users, at 5.6 prompts and 17-word queries, build deep, layered resources that survive repeated follow-up questions. For ChatGPT, at 5.0 prompts per session, balance both: a direct answer up top with depth underneath.

Things to Keep in Mind

The persona names, Everyday Consumers, Professionals and Students, and Tech Enthusiasts, are Similarweb's labels for patterns in its data. 

They are useful summaries, not descriptions of every individual user. The affinity scores also compare each platform's audience with the average Google searcher, so they say how different a group is from that baseline, not how large it is. Use them to decide where to look first, then check your own visibility on each platform before committing budget.

It also helps to know the wider picture. Users aged 18 to 34 make up 50% of generative AI users worldwide for June 2025 to May 2026, down from 61% in May 2024. 

That drop shows adoption spreading to older groups as the technology becomes a mainstream tool, so these audiences may keep shifting.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Kind of People use ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude?

Similarweb's 2026 Website Affinity Index identifies three personas. ChatGPT attracts everyday consumers, with 2.4x affinity for restaurant and delivery sites and 2.3x for health. Claude attracts professionals and students, with 25x affinity for university sites and 3.0x for programming. Gemini attracts tech enthusiasts, with 4.8x affinity for graphics and web design and 3.1x for computer security.

Do Professionals Prefer Claude Over ChatGPT?

Professional and academic users concentrate on Claude more than on any other platform. Claude users are 25x more likely than the average Google searcher to visit university sites, 3.0x for business services and programming sites, and 2.7x for job sites. The source adds that ChatGPT likely has more professionals in absolute terms, but Claude has the highest professional concentration.

Why Does Gemini Attract Different Users than ChatGPT?

Gemini's audience self-selects around technical interests despite Google's mainstream distribution. Its users over-index on graphics and web design (4.8x), computer security (3.1x), and computer hardware (2.2x), while ChatGPT's users over-index on mainstream consumer categories such as restaurants, health, and fashion.

How do Prompt Lengths Differ Across AI Platforms?

Claude users write the longest prompts, with a 17-word median and 5.6 prompts per session. ChatGPT follows at 13 words and 5.0 prompts, Gemini at 12 words and 2.2 prompts, Google's AI Mode at 9 words, and traditional Google Search at just 3 words per query. These figures are from US desktop data for June 2025 to May 2026.

What Age Group uses AI Chatbots Most?

Users aged 18 to 34 make up 50% of generative AI users worldwide for the June 2025 to May 2026 period. That is down from 61% in May 2024, as adoption spreads to older groups.

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