Global ranking of the most popular AI chatbots by usage
- Graziano Stefanelli
- Sep 18
- 4 min read
AI chatbots continue to dominate global attention in 2025, with millions of daily users and billions of monthly visits across their platforms. However, the competitive landscape is evolving quickly, with new entrants challenging established leaders and significant shifts between web traffic and mobile app engagement. Analyzing recent usage data reveals clear differences in adoption trends, platform performance, and regional influence among the most popular tools.
ChatGPT remains the global leader with unmatched web traffic and user base
ChatGPT maintains its position as the most widely used AI chatbot worldwide, recording approximately 5.72 billion monthly visits to its platform in July 2025. This figure represents a significant lead over every competitor, demonstrating OpenAI’s sustained dominance in consumer adoption, developer integration, and cross-platform availability.
The platform’s popularity is also reinforced by mobile usage metrics, where ChatGPT reaches over 378 million monthly active users (MAU) on its dedicated app and approximately 700 million weekly active users (WAU) across all devices. ChatGPT’s integration within other products, such as Microsoft Copilot and API-powered services, further amplifies its reach beyond direct site visits.
This dominant position highlights ChatGPT’s combination of model strength, strong partnerships, and platform flexibility, which continues to make it the default choice for most AI-driven productivity workflows.
Gemini rapidly expands its audience and closes the mobile gap
Google’s Gemini platform has seen rapid growth since its consolidation of Bard and DeepMind technologies into a single ecosystem. In July 2025, Gemini registered an estimated ~700 million monthly visits across its web portals, representing roughly 12% of ChatGPT’s total traffic.
On mobile, Gemini’s adoption is even stronger. Reports estimate 400–450 million MAU on Android and iOS combined, driven by its deep integration with Google services like Search, Gmail, Docs, and YouTube. Its hybrid role as both a standalone AI assistant and a workspace-integrated productivity engine makes it a compelling alternative for users already within Google’s ecosystem.
Gemini’s growing mobile-first strategy signals Google’s push to compete with OpenAI not only on core AI performance but also on distribution, leveraging Android and its global application network to accelerate adoption.
DeepSeek and Grok dominate the mid-tier segment with rapid momentum
Beyond ChatGPT and Gemini, competition intensifies among tools in the mid-market adoption range, with DeepSeek and Grok showing significant momentum in global traffic rankings.
DeepSeek, an emerging AI platform emphasizing reasoning efficiency and performance, recorded approximately 350.5 million monthly visits in July 2025. Its fast adoption reflects interest from both developers and advanced users seeking alternatives with competitive context handling and model customization options.
Grok, developed by xAI and tightly integrated into the X (formerly Twitter) ecosystem, reached 201.5 million monthly visits. Its integration with X’s conversational flows and premium subscription model creates a differentiated experience focused on real-time search, community discussions, and creative generation.
Both platforms continue to evolve quickly, with major updates in reasoning capabilities, personalization options, and integrations expected to intensify competition in the coming months.
Perplexity and Claude gain steady adoption among knowledge-focused users
Perplexity AIÂ and Claude AIÂ occupy a distinct segment of the global usage landscape, appealing to researchers, professionals, and knowledge workers who prioritize accuracy and deep context capabilities.
Perplexity recorded approximately 140.6 million monthly visits in July 2025, fueled by its AI-powered search engine approach and retrieval-augmented generation workflows. Its performance in specialized research tasks has made it a preferred companion for structured analysis and citation-driven outputs.
Claude, developed by Anthropic, saw approximately 125.2 million monthly visits during the same period. Known for its natural language fluency and long-context reasoning capabilities, Claude has gained significant traction among enterprise teams and developers using Claude’s API for document processing and data-intensive tasks.
Both tools maintain smaller audiences than the top-tier leaders, but they provide advanced specialization that drives strong retention rates and repeat engagement among professional and enterprise users.
Overall adoption trends reveal a rapidly evolving competitive landscape
The global usage rankings for AI chatbots reflect several ongoing shifts shaping the market in 2025. While ChatGPT remains the clear leader in both web and mobile engagement, Gemini continues to close the adoption gap, particularly on mobile platforms where Google’s integration advantage is strongest. DeepSeek and Grok are redefining the mid-tier competition, and Perplexity and Claude are capturing dedicated niches among power users seeking depth and accuracy.
With competition intensifying and new features launching across all platforms, rankings outside the top two remain highly dynamic. Future updates to Claude, DeepSeek, and Grok could quickly shift mid-tier positions, while Gemini’s integration strategy and ChatGPT’s sustained model updates will continue to define the battle for global dominance.
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