The effect of LLMs for Translation: What are people using for translation in 2026?
Google says more than a billion people a month now ask it for translations. Over the same period, third-party traffic estimates show the standalone translation websites losing visitors. I wanted to see how both can be true, so I pulled together the public usage numbers for the big chatbots and translation tools from 2023 to mid-2026.
My reading of the data: people still translate at least as much as before, but more of it happens inside products they already have open. Search, the browser, the phone camera and chatbots have taken over a lot of the quick lookups that used to go to a dedicated translation site.
The chatbot curves
ChatGPT has the best-documented numbers of the group. OpenAI reported 100 million weekly active users in November 2023, 200 million in August 2024, 400 million in February 2025, 800 million in October 2025 and 900 million in February 2026. Sensor Tower, a market research firm, estimates that the ChatGPT app crossed 1 billion monthly active users in May 2026; Reuters reported the estimate on June 2. Weekly users doubled every six to nine months until late 2025.
The Gemini app grew on a similar scale in less time. Google's own figures, shown in a court hearing in April 2025, put it at 350 million monthly users in March 2025. By Google I/O in May 2026 it had passed 900 million, about 2.5 times as many in 14 months, and Alphabet reported 950 million on its July 2026 earnings call.
I left Claude off the chart because Anthropic publishes no user figures, so I had no official number to plot. Third-party estimates disagree by a wide margin. Some trackers put Claude at around 30 million consumer monthly actives, while Sensor Tower's 2026 report counts roughly 245 million monthly users across web and mobile. A large share of Claude usage also runs through the API and enterprise contracts, which consumer app trackers can't see. For a product that mostly runs inside other companies' software, a public usage chart would miss most of the usage.
Google Translate doubled anyway
Google Translate had 200 million monthly users in 2012 and passed 500 million by 2016. For its 20th anniversary in April 2026, Google reported more than 1 billion monthly users and support for almost 250 languages. The two numbers aren't measured the same way: the 2026 figure counts everyone who used Google's translation across Translate, Search, Lens and Circle to Search. Even with that caveat, Google's translation reach roughly doubled during the years chatbots took off, which I didn't expect.
Google also says about a third of people using Translate on mobile use the app to learn and practice a language, not only to look something up.
Distribution explains most of the growth. Google Translate sits inside Search, Chrome, Lens and Android, so you rarely have to go looking for it. If you search for a foreign phrase or point your camera at a menu, Google translates it without you ever opening a translation site.
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Open AppThe squeeze on standalone translation sites
The standalone consumer translation website is the format under pressure: the site you bookmarked and opened every time you needed to translate a sentence or a paragraph.
DeepL is the easiest case to measure. Semrush estimates put DeepL at 204.55 million web visits in June 2025 and 145.43 million in June 2026, a drop of about 29 percent. I compared June with June to keep seasonal effects out. The monthly series still jumps around, though, so I wouldn't read much into any single month. A reading near 190 million in March 2026 looks like an outlier, and panel-based traffic estimates are noisy by design.
DeepL the company is doing fine. It reports more than 200,000 business customers and has launched voice translation products in 2026. The drop shows up in consumer web visits, so it looks like casual users moving elsewhere rather than weaker demand for DeepL's business products.
Reverso may be the clearest case of chatbots replacing a tool. It had 96 million monthly active users in June 2019 and now says it has 70 million monthly users. Its core use case, checking how a phrase is used in context, is the kind of question people now type into a chatbot. Both figures come from Reverso itself and may not be measured the same way, so treat the decline as approximate.
Naver's Papago went the other way. Its monthly active users grew from 10 million in 2019 to 20.74 million in May 2024, helped by strong Korean and East Asian language coverage. Papago's growth suggests that a tool with deep regional coverage can hold its own against general-purpose chatbots.
What this means
I don't think large language models killed translation tools as a category. People translate more text than before, and they do it in search results, in the browser and in chat windows. The tools losing traffic are the destination sites built for quick one-off lookups. For casual use, few people still open a new tab, go to a translation site and paste text in when the answer already shows up where they are.
The people who still open a dedicated translation tool on purpose usually care about the result: professionals translating contracts or documentation, language learners who want to know why a phrase works, and anyone for whom a wrong translation has consequences. For learners, we wrote a separate post on how to use a translator to learn a language that goes through the research.
We build Fink Translate for that second group. It shows what changed in a translation and why; how Fink works has the details.
A note on the numbers
The chart's y-axis mixes metrics that aren't directly comparable, so read any visual comparison loosely. Weekly active users for ChatGPT sit next to monthly active users for Gemini and Google Translate. Google Translate figures exist only as occasional milestone announcements, so the line between them is interpolation, not measurement. The DeepL series uses Semrush web visit estimates, which come from panel sampling, not server logs.
I anchored each figure to a primary source where one exists. The ChatGPT numbers come from OpenAI announcements, compiled by Backlinko with citations, and Reuters reported the Sensor Tower estimate of 1 billion monthly app users. The Gemini points come from Alphabet earnings calls and Google events, including the 750 million milestone announced in February 2026, plus the April 2025 court hearing. Coverage of Google's 20th anniversary post carries the 1 billion figure for Google Translate. The Papago series comes from Naver via The Korea Times. Reverso's 2019 count is on its Wikipedia page, and the current figure is from Reverso's own site.