Other Chatbots Also Gaining Traction

ChatGPT might be the big name in the world of chatbot apps, but other bots are hot on its heels, according to the latest data from Similarweb and Sensor Tower. These analytics firms have been tracking the ups and downs of chatbot usage, and it's clear that the competition is heating up.

Similarweb, which keeps an eye on website traffic, has noticed a significant increase in the use of bots like Google's Gemini and Microsoft's Copilot, which is powered by OpenAI. In March, Gemini saw its daily web visits climb to an average of 10.9 million worldwide, a 7.4% jump from the previous month. Copilot wasn't far behind, with daily visits increasing to 2.4 million, up 2.1% from February.

Anthropic's Claude also saw some action, pulling in an average of 3.3 million daily visits in March. Meanwhile, China's DeepSeek chatbot was doing even better, hitting a whopping 16.5 million visits that same month. And let's not forget xAI's Grok, which, despite being a newer kid on the block, managed to match DeepSeek's impressive numbers with 16.5 million average daily web visits.

Of course, these numbers are still a drop in the bucket compared to ChatGPT, which soared past 500 million weekly active users by the end of March. But David Carr from Similarweb pointed out that the race for the second spot is getting intense.

"For March, DeepSeek took the second place, even though its traffic dropped by 25% from February," Carr told TechCrunch. "DeepSeek kinda came out of nowhere back in January, but right now, the AI platform with the most momentum is definitely Grok from Elon Musk's xAI, with traffic skyrocketing nearly 800% month-over-month."

It's not just the web where these bots are making waves. AI companies' mobile chatbot apps are also seeing a surge in users, possibly thanks to the release of new AI models.

Sensor Tower's data shows that the Claude app saw a 21% increase in weekly active users during the week of February 24, right when Anthropic dropped its latest flagship AI model, Claude 3.7 Sonnet. Just two weeks before that, after Google rolled out its Gemini 2.0 Flash model, the Gemini app's weekly active users jumped by 42%.

Abraham Yousef, a senior insights analyst at Sensor Tower, reckons it's not just the new models driving this growth. New features are playing a big role too. Google recently added a "canvas" feature to Gemini, which lets users check out the results of their coding projects before finalizing them. Anthropic has also been busy adding new tools to its Claude client.

"The launch of popular new AI models, more people getting interested in AI, the addition of new features and functions, and the growing number of different ways people are using these bots—it's all pushing user growth for AI chatbot apps," Yousef told TechCrunch.

But don't expect OpenAI to be breaking into a sweat just yet. Yousef mentioned that as of March, ChatGPT still had ten times the number of mobile app weekly active users compared to Gemini and Claude combined.