The popularity of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, currently the world’s most widely-used chatbot app, is being challenged by rival services, according to recent data from analytics firms Similarweb and Sensor Tower.

SimilarWeb, which tracks website traffic, including that of chatbot web apps, has observed significant increases in usage for bots such as Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s OpenAI-powered Copilot. Specifically, Gemini’s web traffic rose to 10.9 million average daily visits globally in March, representing a 7.4% month-over-month increase, while Copilot saw a 2.1% rise to 2.4 million daily visits.

Additionally, Similarweb reports that Anthropic’s Claude achieved 3.3 million average daily visits in March, and the chatbot from Chinese AI lab DeepSeek surpassed 16.5 million visits during the same period. Meanwhile, xAI’s Grok, which only recently launched a web app, averaged an identical number of daily web visits to DeepSeek’s chatbot, at 16.5 million.

While these figures are dwarfed by ChatGPT, which exceeded 500 million weekly active users in late March, David Carr, editor at Similarweb, notes that the competition for the second spot is intense.

As Carr explained to TechCrunch, “In March, DeepSeek held the second position, despite experiencing a 25% drop in traffic from February, based on daily visits. Chinese company DeepSeek emerged out of nowhere in January, but the AI platform with the most momentum currently is Grok from Elon Musk’s xAI, with traffic increasing nearly 800% month-over-month.”

The user bases of AI companies’ mobile chatbot apps are also expanding, possibly driven by recent releases of new AI models.

Data from app data analysis firm Sensor Tower reveals that the Claude app saw a 21% week-over-week increase in weekly active users during the week of February 24, coinciding with the release of Anthropic’s latest flagship AI model, Claude 3.7 Sonnet. Two weeks prior, following Google’s launch of its Gemini 2.0 Flash model, the Gemini app experienced a 42% growth in weekly active users.

Abraham Yousef, senior insights analyst at Sensor Tower, attributes the growth not only to new models but also to the introduction of new capabilities. Recently, Google introduced a “canvas” feature to Gemini, allowing users to preview coding project outputs, and Anthropic has continually added tools to its Claude client.

According to Yousef, “The introduction of popular new AI models, increased consumer interest in the space, the addition of various new features and functions, and the growing number of unique use cases have driven user growth for AI chatbot apps.”

However, OpenAI is unlikely to be concerned, as Yousef pointed out that ChatGPT had 10 times more mobile app weekly active users than Gemini and Claude combined as of March.