Not all AI models are created equal, and people are becoming more strategic in how they use them.
On Tuesday, Perplexity published research indicating that as AI models become increasingly sophisticated, the ways people use them have become fragmented. The research finds that no individual model has garnered more than a 17% share of the overall usage on their platform.
Perplexity offers a unique perspective on this, as users can choose from a variety of models from different providers when running queries.
The market fragmentation deepened in 2025, according to the research. In January 2025, two models – Claude Sonnet 4 and GPT-4o – accounted for more than 90% of all AI usage on its platform. By December, the leading model captured 23% of queries, while four models each had a 10% share.
Perplexity’s data shows that teams are leveraging different models for different tasks:
- Approximately 40% of visual arts users relied on Gemini Flash. Meanwhile, 31% of financial analysis tasks were done with Gemini 3.0 Pro Thinking.
- Nearly a third of debugging and software development tasks relied on Claude Sonnet 4.5, and 23% of legal and court case queries relied on Claude Thinking models.
- OpenAI’s GPT-5.1 Thinking was a common choice for medical research tasks, garnering 13% of queries.
“As new models launch, these preferences are likely to shift,” Perplexity wrote in the report. “What leads today may not lead next quarter.”
And the bigger the enterprise, the more likely it is to leverage a wider array of models. Perplexity’s top 50 enterprise accounts use 30 models on average, compared to seven for average accounts.