Five Trends Transforming the Global Artificial Intelligence Market
ChatGPT remains the leader, artificial intelligence extends beyond browsers, AI agents have become a reality, and three separate ecosystems are gradually emerging — Western, Chinese, and Russian.
Illustrative image. Photo: Getty/Andriy Onufriyenko
Three years ago, when researchers from the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) first tried to determine which artificial intelligence services had truly become mainstream, the market looked quite simple. There was a clear distinction between companies originally built around artificial intelligence, such as ChatGPT, Midjourney, or Character.AI, and the rest of the software that was only beginning to adopt the new technology.
Now, as the authors of the new analysis "Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps" note, this distinction is no longer relevant. Artificial intelligence has become a key element of many popular services. That is why any consumer product where generative artificial intelligence became a core part of the user experience was included in the new analysis.
The rankings are compiled based on the number of unique website visits (SimilarWeb) and the monthly audience of mobile apps (Sensor Tower) as of January 2026.
Top 50 web products with generative artificial intelligence by unique monthly visits. January 2026. Source: SimilarWeb.
1. ChatGPT Remains the Leader, but the Battle for "Main AI Assistant" Status is Just Beginning
ChatGPT still significantly outperforms competitors. On the internet, its audience is 2.7 times larger than that of the second most popular service, Gemini, and on mobile devices, it's 2.5 times larger. Over the last year, the number of weekly ChatGPT users grew by 500 million, reaching about 900 million — more than 10% of the planet's population. In terms of web traffic volume, ChatGPT is 2.5 times ahead of its closest competitor, Gemini.
However, competition is gradually intensifying. Gemini and Claude are rapidly increasing their number of paid subscribers: in 2025 in the US, their growth was 258% for Gemini and over 200% for Claude. A trend towards multi-platform usage is observed: approximately 20% of weekly ChatGPT users also turn to Gemini.
Gemini and Claude are actively developing their own ecosystems and app stores, which allow integrating artificial intelligence with email, calendar, and business systems, significantly increasing the difficulty of switching to another service provider.
Top 50 mobile applications with generative artificial intelligence by monthly active users. January 2026. Source: Sensor Tower.
It is already clear how platforms are diverging in different directions. OpenAI aims to make ChatGPT a universal interface for billions of people, transforming it into a "super-app" for everyday tasks like shopping, travel, or health care. In turn, Anthropic (Claude) targets the most active and professional users, offering exclusive integrations with financial terminals, scientific databases, and complex infrastructure for developers.
As a result, this confrontation less and less resembles earlier search engine wars with one dominant player, and becomes more akin to the competition of mobile operating systems, where two different philosophies create their own multi-billion-dollar ecosystems that coexist in the market.
AI chatbot market share by country. January 2026. Source: SimilarWeb and Sensor Tower
2. Three Separate Ecosystems
Geographically, the global artificial intelligence market is breaking down into three separate ecosystems, between which the gap is gradually widening. Western tools, such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity, have a similar user base in the US, India, Brazil, the UK, and Indonesia; however, they are almost not represented in China and Russia due to sanctions and censorship restrictions.
The only product that managed to unite these markets was DeepSeek, whose web traffic is distributed among China, accounting for 33.5%, Russia with 7.1%, and the US, which provides 6.6% of visits.
Russia quickly transformed into a third independent market pole, where sanctions contributed to the rapid growth of local developments. For example, the Yandex browser with the built-in assistant "Alice" reached 71 million active mobile users per month, entering the global top ten leaders, and Sber's GigaChat service entered the web ranking for the first time. This situation mirrors the Chinese experience, where, besides DeepSeek, Doubao by Bytedance and the local model Kimi are popular.
However, if we consider the level of technology adoption per capita according to a special index, the geographical picture looks different.
Singapore ranks first in the world, followed by the United Arab Emirates, Hong Kong, and South Korea. At the same time, the US, where most popular artificial intelligence products were created, is only in twentieth place on this list.
Where artificial intelligence is most actively implemented in the world. Source: SimilarWeb and Sensor Tower
3. Creative Tools are Changing Positions
A clear evolution of creative AI-based programs is observed. While in September 2023, 7 out of 9 creative tools on the list were image generators, three years later, their number decreased to 3, and the vacant spots were taken by products for video, music, and voice. This happened due to the integration of image generation models directly into ChatGPT and Gemini, causing the popularity of individual programs to drop: for example, Midjourney fell from the top 10 to 46th place.
Video generation became the most dynamic segment, where Chinese developments Kling AI and Hailuo maintain quality leadership.
Image generation still dominates creative AI tools, but their use is gradually shifting to universal AI platforms. Source: SimilarWeb
The music and voice sectors proved more resilient to corporate competition: the music service Suno retained its 15th place, and ElevenLabs is consistently present in the rankings thanks to unique voice cloning and dubbing features.
The general trend shows that in areas where Google and OpenAI concentrated their efforts (images and video), traffic for individual programs is decreasing, while in the music and voice niches, more space remains for independent products.
4. AI Agents Become a Reality
The next trend noted by the authors is the transition from ordinary chatbots to intelligent digital assistants — AI agents. Unlike conventional artificial intelligence, which simply answers questions or draws pictures, these programs can independently perform complex sequential tasks for you: for example, conduct research, fill tables, or plan activities.
This area is developing very rapidly: Meta paid about $2 billion for the Manus assistant, and the creators of ChatGPT acquired the OpenClaw project, which became incredibly popular in early 2026. New similar services, like Genspark, are already attracting hundreds of millions of dollars in investments.
For many people, such assistants are becoming part of everyday life, as they can be used through regular messages in WhatsApp or Telegram. Now the main question is whether these highly specialized agents will become the primary tools, or if users will prefer the already familiar ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.
Illustrative image. Photo: pixabay
5. Artificial Intelligence Extends Beyond Browsers and Apps
The last important trend is that artificial intelligence ceases to be just a separate website or mobile application. Now a significant part of its use takes place where traditional rankings cannot capture it.
Firstly, internet browsers themselves are transforming into artificial intelligence products. Over the last year, OpenAI launched the Atlas browser with built-in ChatGPT, Perplexity — Comet, and Browser Company — Dia. Instead of creating new browsers, Google and Anthropic decided to integrate their assistants Gemini and Claude directly into the popular Chrome.
Computer programs for professionals showed significant growth. Claude Code reached an annual revenue of about $1 billion in six months, and OpenAI's Codex gained 2 million weekly users. Among ordinary users, programs for automatic note-taking and meeting recording (e.g., Fireflies, Otter, Granola) gained popularity, which together have 20 million visitors.
Finally, artificial intelligence has become a built-in feature in the tools that we use daily. Now Claude and ChatGPT work directly inside Excel and PowerPoint.
Google deeply integrated Gemini into its documents, email, and spreadsheets, and in January 2026, launched the "Personal Intelligence" system. This allows the assistant to see your hotel bookings in email, personal photos, and YouTube viewing history, to help you without unnecessary explanations.
As a result, traditional website traffic rankings less and less reflect reality, because artificial intelligence is transforming from a separate service into an invisible but useful function within every application.