What OpenRouter's AI Tokens Are Used For
This chart splits the tokens processed on OpenRouter by what they were used for, from programming and technology questions to roleplay, using OpenRouter's own weekly estimates from a sample of requests. It starts in May 2025, when OpenRouter began publishing the split.
What does it show?
Programming took 56% of OpenRouter's tokens in the week to September 20, 2026, up from 35% in July 2025, while roleplay fell to 6% from a peak of 33%.
Methodology
OpenRouter Datasets API, rankings-daily, with a category filter: weekly tokens (Monday to Sunday, each week dated by its Sunday) for each of OpenRouter's eleven top-level uses, from the week of May 19, 2025, summing the top 50 models and the row for all others. OpenRouter estimates each use from a sample of requests and scales it up, so these are estimates, and a week's uses need not add up to its total tokens exactly. Each use is shown as a share of the eleven uses' sum; the first weeks swing widely (programming went from 10% to 38% in four), so the summary compares with July 2025. Marketing, science, translation, legal, finance, health, trivia and academia are combined as all other uses; the narrower marketing/seo category is left out because it is not consistently a part of marketing. The current, unfinished week is left out. One marketplace, not the AI market: developers and apps, heavy on coding tools and roleplay, and none of ChatGPT, Claude.ai or company traffic that goes straight to the labs. Source: OpenRouter (openrouter.ai/rankings), as of 2026-09-27; CC BY 4.0.