What 55 Billion Chatbot Visits Actually Tell Us About the AI Race and the Best AI Chatbots Right Now
What AI Chatbots are People using and What that Tells us about where the Industry is headed
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ChatGPT owns 48% of all chatbot traffic. Grok exploded by 1,343,408% in a single year. DeepSeek spiked to 520 million visits—then crashed nearly 40% in five months.
A new study tracked 55.88 billion visits across the top AI chatbots from August 2024 to July 2025, mapping which players are winning the race for user attention. At first glance, it looks like a land grab. But dig deeper, and those 55 billion visits fracture into three distinct games, each with its own logic, incentives, and endgame.
For example, we see that the battle for the best AI chatbot is splitting into 3 categories:
Consumer chatbot war (being the place where everyday users go to use LLMs).
Platform integration: Google embedding Gemini across Search, Gmail, and Android; Microsoft threading Copilot through Office and Windows.
And hidden in the data is a third frontier entirely—quality capture—where smaller players build defensibility not through reach, but through depth of engagement (significantly higher minutes spent on platfrom).
Then, some hints suggest that traditional mental models for valuing tech might not match reality. While assumed to be network-effect-enabled winner-take-all markets, the chatbots follow a radically different data distribution. Across 10,500 tools, the top 10 capture just 59% of total traffic. In real winner-take-all markets, the top three alone typically hold over 80%. That gap is a massive signal when we consider that most of these tools wrap around the popular models that are directly competing against them in this study. The differences are sharp enough to suggest that most of the discourse around “who’s winning AI” is anchored to the wrong metrics entirely.
By looking not just at visits, but also at session length, growth momentum, and retention decay, I will answer the following questions:
What are the rankings for the “Best Chatbots” in AI right now? Both on composite scoring, and based on these individual factors.
Why ChatGPT’s 48% market share signals fragmentation, not dominance.
What Grok’s meteoric rise proves about distribution versus product quality.
What we can learn about virality and usage by studying 7.7 million articles on different chatbots.
Why the chatbot with the most traffic and the one with the longest sessions are playing different games entirely—and which one’s building a real moat.
Which metrics actually predict who wins in 2026.
And why the real battle may not involve chatbots at all (aka what is coming next).
and much more.
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