Latest AI Rankings | ChatGPT Dominates the AI Market! Similarweb's data reveals the brutal reality of the generative AI market: While debates continue about which AI model is technically superior, ChatGPT has achieved a landslide victory in user adoption, its lead so significant it surpasses traditional competitive metrics.
In May 2025, ChatGPT reached 5.5 billion monthly active user visits, accounting for approximately 80% of all generative AI traffic. This means ChatGPT's traffic surpasses the combined total of competitors such as Google Gemini, DeepSeek, Grok, Perplexity, and Claude, and by a significant margin. Between September and November 2024, ChatGPT's mobile app boasted over 250 million monthly active users, surpassing 500 million weekly active users by the end of March 2025. Despite a slight dip in traffic early in 2025, OpenAI quickly reversed this trend, pushing user numbers to new highs.
Latest AI Rankings | ChatGPT Dominates the AI Market: The Rise of Chinese Startup DeepSeek
Data reveals the impressive performance of Chinese startup DeepSeek. Despite being banned from many US government-issued devices and institutions due to concerns about data transfer to China, its monthly active user visits surged from 33.7 million in January 2025 to 436 million in May 2025, a 13-fold increase.
While OpenAI invests heavily in purchasing massive quantities of GPUs to support its model, DeepSeek's operational costs are significantly lower than Western models. Its input token cost is just $0.55, compared to OpenAI's $15. DeepSeek achieved this using a limited number of Nvidia H800 chips (affected by export restrictions), a feat described as winning a Formula 1 race at the speed of a Toyota Corolla. Similarweb data shows DeepSeek's primary markets are concentrated in China, India, and Indonesia, with users from these three markets accounting for over 51% of its total user base.
Latest AI Rankings | Performance of Other Competitors: Google and Anthropic
For a $2 trillion company processing 3.5 billion searches daily, Google's AI performance is relatively underwhelming. Despite its massive resources, integration throughout the Google ecosystem, and the world's largest user base, Gemini's monthly visits stand at only 527.7 million, slightly higher than DeepSeek. Notably, Gemini's visits were 284 million in February, indicating user growth.
Anthropic's Claude shows even more surprising results. Despite backing from Amazon and Google, excellent performance in many benchmark tests, and widespread praise from AI researchers and academia, its May 2025 visits were under 100 million. As of early 2025, Claude had 18.9 million monthly active users globally; while this represents significant growth, it pales in comparison to ChatGPT's billions. Claude 4 Opus outperforms competitors on complex reasoning and creative tasks, but this hasn't translated into large-scale user adoption, again proving that the best product isn't always the most popular. Meta AI's current usage is likely far lower than ChatGPT, with many users currently not favoring Zuck's chatbot as their preferred AI tool. Meta's significant contributions to the open-source community, particularly its Llama model, are noteworthy, but the open-source nature differs from direct user interaction.
Latest AI Rankings | ChatGPT Dominates the AI Market: Impact on Traditional Industries
Similarweb's data shows AI's rise is significantly impacting traditional internet businesses. Chegg's traffic plummeted 64% due to students using ChatGPT to complete assignments for free; Quora dropped 51%; and freelance platforms like Fiverr fell 14%. Meanwhile, DevOps and code completion tools saw a 41% year-over-year increase; voice generation platforms grew 14%; and automation tools grew 12%.
Conclusion:
Similarweb's data clearly shows that in the AI industry, technical superiority doesn't guarantee market success; user adoption is key. ChatGPT's success is attributed to its first-mover advantage, sufficiently good performance, and a strategy that meets user needs. OpenAI may lag in some benchmark tests, but in global user adoption, it has crossed the finish line first. The real competition is now for second place.
