OpenAI’s ChatGPT remains the most popular chatbot application worldwide, but competitors are beginning to close the gap, as indicated by data from analytics companies Similarweb and Sensor Tower.
Similarweb, which estimates website traffic, including traffic to chatbot web apps, has noted increased usage of bots such as Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s OpenAI-powered Copilot. In March, Gemini’s web traffic rose to an average of 10.9 million daily visits globally, marking a 7.4% increase from the previous month. Meanwhile, Copilot’s daily visits climbed to 2.4 million, a 2.1% rise from February.
Additionally, Similarweb reports that Anthropic’s Claude reached an average of 3.3 million daily visits in March. DeepSeek’s chatbot, from a Chinese AI lab, surpassed 16.5 million visits during the same period. On the other hand, xAI’s Grok, which only launched its web app a few months earlier, matched DeepSeek’s chatbot with 16.5 million average daily visits.
Despite these figures, they remain overshadowed by ChatGPT, which exceeded 500 million weekly active users by the end of March. David Carr, editor at Similarweb, remarked on the intense competition for the second position among chatbots.
Carr stated that in March, DeepSeek held the second spot despite experiencing a 25% decline in traffic compared to February. He further explained that although DeepSeek emerged unexpectedly in January, the AI platform with the most significant momentum currently is Grok from Elon Musk’s xAI, which saw a traffic increase of nearly 800% month-over-month.
AI companies’ mobile chatbot applications are also expanding their user bases, possibly driven by recent releases of AI models.
According to Sensor Tower, a company specializing in app data analysis, Claude’s app experienced a 21% week-over-week rise in weekly active users during the week of February 24, coinciding with Anthropic’s release of their newest flagship AI model, Claude 3.7 Sonnet. Two weeks earlier, after Google made the Gemini 2.0 Flash model widely available, the Gemini app saw a 42% increase in weekly active users.
Abraham Yousef, a senior insights analyst at Sensor Tower, attributes the growth in user numbers not only to the introduction of new models but also to advancements in capabilities. For instance, Google recently introduced a "canvas" feature to Gemini, allowing users to preview the output of coding projects, while Anthropic has consistently enhanced its Claude client with new tools.
Yousef highlighted that the deployment of popular new AI models, growing consumer interest in the field, the introduction of diverse new features and functionalities, and the expanding range of unique use cases have driven user growth for AI chatbot apps.
However, OpenAI does not appear to be overly concerned. Yousef indicated that as of March, ChatGPT had ten times more weekly active users on mobile apps compared to Gemini and Claude combined.
