#2 AI Lab by OpenRouter Market Share Week of September 28 prediction

The most concrete figure in the research is a single day: in the September 15, 2026 bucket, Gemini 3.8 Flash processed 2.43T tokens, far below the leaders. GPT-5.6 Luna led at 17.4T, followed by Tencent's Hy4 preview at 13.6T and DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 at 11.5T, according to a report. That is a token ranking for one day, and it is not the measure that decides this question. The question turns on the Market Share chart, set to Percentage, for the week of September 28 to October 4, 2026. OpenRouter's own page says that chart counts requests, while the leaderboards rank tokens. The research I have does not include Google's request share, so I can't say where Google sits on the chart that counts. What the forecast does rest on is that Gemini 3.8 Flash was well behind the other named models in tokens, and that several other labs have models with much larger volumes. That makes Google being second a hard case to argue, though it is not a settled one. Token volume and request share can diverge, and a lightweight model could draw many requests with few tokens. The week was still in progress at the time of this forecast, and the final figures are due only once the week of October 5 is first displayed. Watch the Market Share chart's request percentages for Google against the labs ahead of it. A clear Google gap on requests, not tokens, would change the picture most.