Artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots have seen strong growth in adoption this year, advancing from experimental tools to become mainstream applications that have entered everyday usage. Chatbots are rebuilding enterprise workflows, changing how people search the internet, igniting a wave of innovation, and sparking fierce competition among AI companies.
The 10 largest chatbots have seen a 123.35% surge in traffic over the past year, growing from 25 billion visits in the August 2023 to July 2024 period to reach 55.9 billion visits in the August 2024 to July 2025 period. The period from March to July 2025 reveals the most aggressive growth, with May alone reaching a record 6.4 billion visits – up from just 2.4 billion the year before.
Much of the debate around the popularity of various chatbots has focused on their features, model size, and the quality of their prompt results.
However, a recent study by OneLittleWeb shows a tight correlation between media mentions and traffic surges to specific chatbots. This flips the narrative and suggests that success in the chatbot economy isn’t only about intelligence, it’s about visibility.
How have the shifts and market shakeups affected the top chatbots so far in 2025?
Key Takeaways
- The AI tools market recorded nearly 100 billion visits in the past year, with the top 10 chatbots alone capturing 58.8% of total traffic.
- Media coverage plays a decisive role in driving chatbot adoption, with 7.7 million press mentions aligning with surges in traffic.
- ChatGPT continues to dominate with 46.6 billion visits, representing nearly half of web traffic across 10,500+ AI tools.
- While ChatGPT’s growth accelerates, challengers like Grok and Gemini are emerging as strong contenders by achieving rapid adoption and rising visibility.
- User engagement varies widely: Claude leads in time spent per session, while Microsoft Copilot attracts brief enterprise-based interactions.
Between August 2024 and July 2025, the AI tools market recorded nearly 100 billion estimated web visits. Despite the market spanning over 10,500 tools, the top 10 AI chatbots captured 58.8% of that traffic, the study showed.
The top chatbots attracted a massive 7.73 million media articles from August 2024 to July 2025, an 11.16% year-over-year increase. The growing media popularity played a visible role in forming public engagement. Surges in press coverage often correlated with spikes in traffic to various chatbots.
Media citations peaked at 817,600 in January 2025 and 1.1 million in February 2025, driving a spike in chatbot traffic to 4.3 billion visits in January and 4.4 billion visits in February.
This was followed by a sharp jump to 5.8 billion visits in March, when ChatGPT introduced platform improvements, several tools increased their multimodal capabilities, and DeepSeek continued its aggressive media rollout.
As AI platforms evolve from simple chat interfaces to more complex agent-based systems, web traffic is increasingly becoming a proxy for user adoption and daily reliance.
The importance of media attention is clear in the traffic data for DeepSeek. Visits to DeepSeek peaked at 520.2 million in February 2025, when it reached 500,000 citations – accounting for almost half of the 1.1 million total citations for chatbots.
However, the attention was fleeting and DeepSeek’s coverage dropped by more than 88% over the next five months, with monthly visits dropping by 39.5% over the same period – mirroring its fall in media attention.
DeepSeek succeeded in breaking into a crowded market and capturing significant attention, driven by strong performance in Chinese markets and rapid development of its underlying large language model (LLM).
However, the declining trend in the chatbot’s traffic indicates the challenge of maintaining viral momentum amid a classic hype cycle of rapid ascent and a sharp peak in attention, followed by a gradual decline as novelty wears off.
Still, with around 2.74 billion visits in just a year and growing brand recognition, DeepSeek remains a serious AI player. Whether traffic continues to decline or levels off will determine whether its initial popularity was a temporary surge in interest because of its novelty or the foundation for sustainable growth.
While DeepSeek’s media visibility declined, the Grok, Claude, and Perplexity chatbots each maintained steady, upward trends in media visibility. Grok achieved a 224.74% year-on-year increase, to 319,500 annual mentions, while Perplexity achieved a 202.49% gain, and Claude saw a 9.22% rise.
The report stated:
“While correlation does not confirm causation, this trend suggests that sustained media visibility may play a reinforcing role in maintaining public interest and usage – especially in an increasingly crowded AI chatbot space.”
ChatGPT Continues to Dominate the AI Chatbot Race
OpenAI launched the generative AI era with the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, and it has maintained its first-mover advantage, continuing to lead the global AI chatbot race in every metric.
Over the 12-month period from August 2024 to July 2025, ChatGPT led in web traffic, media attention, and user engagement – earning the top spot in the study’s weighted ranking based on measurable data from sources like Semrush, Muckrack, aitools.xyz, and app stores.
Unlike the other top chatbots, ChatGPT maintained consistency at scale.
- Traffic soared by 106% year over year to 46.59 billion visits, reflecting consistent upward movement
- By adding 24 billion visits, it accounted for close to 77.83% of the total growth across the top 10.
- And a jump to 5.01 billion visits per month in the May–July period, compared with 3.88 billion per month over the full year, suggests an acceleration in the market leader’s adoption.
- As of July 2025, it accounted for 48.36% of all web visits to AI tools, reinforcing its position as the default interface for AI use, the study noted.
- To put that in perspective, the next nine chatbots combined account for just 10.45% of total traffic.
“ChatGPT isn’t just a household name – it’s a habit,” the report stated.
Its deep integration across OpenAI’s ecosystem and Microsoft products helped it remain relevant even as new competitors emerged.
ChatGPT was the most mentioned chatbot globally, generating 2.4 million media articles, showing that sustained press attention creates a reinforcing cycle of awareness and adoption.
Beyond the Leaderboard: What Average Session Time Reveals
While media visibility has a notable impact on chatbot traffic, the amount of time users spend per session actively engaging reveals their utility beyond their initial novelty. After all, visitors may briefly try them out once and never return.
While some AI tools are used for entertainment, some have become valued work tools. Who are users spending the most time with?
Claude edged out overall leader ChatGPT as well as Grok for the top spot in session time, averaging 16:44 per visit, compared with 15:43 for Grok and 15:25 for ChatGPT. This depth of interaction is a strong sign of user engagement and satisfaction.
DeepSeek ranks in the middle of the range for usage duration, indicating that it has achieved some utility beyond the hype around its launch. Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s Copilot lag behind, averaging 11:13 and 9:04 sessions, respectively.
The Best of the Rest
The AI chatbot market is splitting into three tiers:
The study indicates:
“Success increasingly depends on platform integration and solving specific user problems exceptionally well, rather than trying to be everything to everyone.”
Grok showed the sharpest rise in momentum. Developed by Elon Musk’s firm xAI and integrated into the X (formerly Twitter) social media platform, Grok entered the market late but has scaled faster than any other chatbot. Its traffic surged from just 51,000 visits to 686.91 million, a 1,343,408% increase year over year, as it dominated headlines. Grok was cited 319,500 times in the media over the year – far more than most of its longer-established competitors.
Grok’s integration with X gives it a unique real-time context and viral distribution that standalone chatbots lack, and Musk’s backing automatically supports its visibility. And the engagement metrics suggest that once they try Grok, users are staying, as session times rival the established players.
Google’s Gemini has achieved a steady and sustainable growth trajectory, thanks to improved Google integration and a user interface, giving it a distribution advantage.
Gemini earned 1.8 million media references, making it one of the most talked-about chatbots, and saw an acceleration in monthly visits in the May–July quarter to 246.2 million, up from an average of 138.6 million monthly visits throughout the year.
Given that it entered the chatbot race relatively late, Gemini is gaining ground fast, and at its current pace, could challenge for the second position by 2026, the report states.
AI startup Anthropic’s Claude chatbot has developed a unique position, as it has established a loyal and engaged user base.
Claude is becoming increasingly popular among software developers for its powerful code generation and developer workflow capabilities, and it offers Claude Code, its specialist coding agent, specifically for developers. Indeed, Anthropic’s analysis of Claude’s interactions shows “disproportionate use of Claude by US workers in computer-related occupations.”
While Claude’s traffic was lower than ChatGPT’s and Grok’s visits during the past year, it led the pack in usage time. The session duration indicates that users turn to Claude for extended conversations rather than quick queries.
The OneLittleWeb report states:
“Claude’s steady growth trajectory shows sustainable scaling driven by word-of-mouth and user satisfaction rather than viral marketing. Once people discover Claude, they stay – building the foundation for long-term market expansion.”
Claude continues to grow steadily, with a 201% increase in visits year-over-year, driven by Anthropic’s focus on alignment, safety, and reliability. “With deeper integrations ahead and this solid engagement foundation, Claude could be poised for a significant breakout in 2026,” the report states.
Meanwhile, Microsoft Copilot is carving out a niche in enterprise integration rather than consumer hype. While it ranks lowest in session duration, this reflects efficient workplace usage rather than poor engagement, according to the study, as Microsoft’s quiet expansion strategy is building sustainable business usage.
Between August 2024 and July 2025, the use of Copilot grew steadily across visits, engagement, and recognition. Its 348% year-on-year rise in traffic reflects consistent enterprise adoption.
Copilot does not compete for attention but is embedded in Office 365 workflows, which 1.3 billion users access daily. In enterprise AI, consistent integration across workflows matters more than lengthy chat sessions.
“The data shows Copilot succeeding where it counts: inside the productivity tools that run modern workplaces,” the report states.
Meta AI has proved to be a notable outlier at the bottom of the top 10. Despite being backed by tech giant Meta Platforms, its presence and adoption have not lived up to expectations, and it trails behind its competitors in real-world usage.
The report says:
“Meta AI’s underperformance highlights a mismatch between resources and real-world impact. While Meta has the infrastructure, funding, and platforms – Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp – to scale any product overnight, its AI assistant has struggled to generate buzz or user loyalty.
“In many ways, Meta AI shows that success in the AI chatbot race isn’t just about who’s backing you – it’s about how quickly you can capture public imagination and prove usefulness at scale. And by that standard, Meta still has a long way to go.”
The past year has been marked by explosive growth in the use of AI chatbots, with intensifying competition and clear market consolidation around a handful of leaders. ChatGPT remains dominant, but rising stars like Grok, Gemini, and Claude show the market is still dynamic.
Platform integration and distribution strategy are the key components of success. ChatGPT has access to Microsoft users, Gemini gains exposure through Google, and Grok has its own niche of X users. Quality also beats quantity – while ChatGPT dominates by volume, Claude’s 16:44 average session time proves users stay longer with tools that provide the response detail they need.
Media attention and user engagement patterns will continue to affect chatbot traffic and adoption. It’s no longer a question of whether businesses and individuals will use these tools; it’s about which ones will best fit their needs.
How does media coverage affect AI chatbot adoption?
Media mentions create visibility that drives user traffic. The more coverage a chatbot gets, the more likely it is to see adoption spikes.
Which AI chatbot leads the market in 2025?
ChatGPT continues to dominate, capturing nearly half of all AI chatbot traffic and maintaining the highest number of media mentions worldwide.
Which challengers are rising against ChatGPT?
Grok, Gemini, and Claude are emerging as strong competitors, showing steady traffic growth fueled by visibility and user engagement.