ChatGPT most popular AI tool with 14.6 billion visits in a year, beats Google Bard & Midjourney

Coming in a very distant second place was Character AI – the site that lets users chat with a variety of AI chatbots with different personalities – with 3.8 billion total visits over the year-long period. Though certainly impressive, that number pales in comparison to ChatGPT’s nearly 15 billion visits. However, a previous study had revealed that Character AI, in fact, enjoyed higher engagement with visitors spending nearly 8 times as much time on the platform than ChatGPT.

AI industry (50 top AI tools): Traffic growth over the last 12 months. (Image: Writerbuddy)

Other major industry players like Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Bing Chat were nowhere close to catching up over the past 12 months. Google Bard, which launched earlier this year, managed 241 million total visits to grab the number 6 spot. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s Bing Chat wasn’t present on the top 10 list.

The distance between ChatGPT and the rest of the pack is likely to grow even wider moving forward. The analysis saw the AI industry as a whole explode 10.7 times year-over-year, fueled by ChatGPT’s viral popularity.

The data for the analysis comes from writerbuddy.ai which tapped SEMrush to gather info from AI tool directories. The company has listed the following AI tools as the top 10 most visited AI tools over the last 12 months:

1. ChatGPT
2. Character AI
3. QuillBot
4. Midjourney
5. Hugging Face
6. Google Bard
7. NovelAI
8. CapCut
9. Janitor AI
10. Civitai

ChatGPT’s dominance aside, the fact of the matter is that AI tools are garnering a steady stream of traffic, with monthly average visits growing from just 241 million in September 2022 to over 4 billion at the peak in May 2023. Unsurprisingly, the top 50 AI tools combined for 24 billion total visits from September 2022 through August 2023.

However, not all AI tools are seeing growth. The likes of Craiyon, Midjourney, and Quillbot actually saw their traffic decline significantly during the same period, even as they continue to hold high rankings in terms of traffic.

Other key insights include:

– The US accounted for 22% of visits at 5.5 billion, while Europe totalled 3.9 billion
– Males outpaced females by over 2-to-1 with 69.5% of visits vs 30.5%
– 63% of visitors accessed AI tools on mobile devices

To conclude, it’s clear that ChatGPT has captured lightning in a bottle with its viral launch and accessible conversational AI. Of course, AI is a fast-changing landscape, so we’ll have to wait and see whether it will be tools from tech titans like Google and Microsoft that will make up ground in 2024 – or if it will be a surprise contender from a fresh AI start-up.