BrightEdge released new AI Market Pulse data showing OpenAI is driving 96% of live AI user-agent activity across the web, highlighting an overlooked front in the AI race: agents. The findings come as market scrutiny around OpenAI intensifies, with recent commentary driving comparisons to Anthropic. BrightEdge CEO Jim Yu stated the market is comparing two entirely different markets, as OpenAI’s strength is in consumer-scale AI activity. According to BrightEdge AI Market Pulse, OpenAI represents 96% of live AI user-agent activity, where AI is acting on behalf of users. OpenAI accounts for 51% of crawl activity used by AI to build its models and 49% of crawl activity used by AI to build search indexes. In May, ChatGPT’s market share of LLM referrals rose 5.7 percentage points to 84.7%, while Gemini and Claude declined to 9.2% and 2.8%, respectively. Agent activity is approaching the scale of organic search, with BrightEdge seeing 88 agentic requests for every 100 organic search visits. Yu noted that OpenAI’s agent lead comes from consumer-facing AI use cases, where users are increasingly using AI systems as a first wave of search.