ChatGPT captures 60% of all top 50 AI tool traffic

Everyone is building an AI tool right now, but a closer look at where the traffic actually flows paints a brutally lopsided picture.

A study published by WriterBuddy analyzing SEMrush web data from September 2022 to August 2023 tracked the 50 most visited AI tools on the planet. Together, these platforms racked up over 24 billion visits in 12 months, posting an eye-popping 10.7x growth rate.

The runaway leader and the niche winners

The real headline here is the absolute domination of ChatGPT. OpenAI's flagship alone accounted for 14 billion visits, grabbing over 60% of all traffic analyzed across the top 50 services. It also led net traffic growth by adding 1.8 billion visits over the studied period.

Character AI landed firmly in second place with 3.8 billion total visits and a net gain of 463.4 million, showing just how hungry users are for persona-driven chatbots. Google Bard secured the third spot with a net gain of 68 million visits, despite its late launch and regional rollouts.

Lower down the list, spicy niche platforms carved out real traction. Janitor AI, an NSFW conversational chatbot platform, surged by 48.8 million net visits in just a few months. Open-source model hub Civitai and search engine Perplexity AI also saw healthy climbs. On the flip side, early darlings like Midjourney and Quillbot actually lost web visits during the timeframe.

Did the bubble burst, or did users just go mobile?

After peaking at roughly 4.1 billion monthly visits across the industry in May 2023, the top 50 tools experienced a sharp pullback, shedding about 1.2 billion visits by August. That triggered a wave of speculation about AI fatigue.

However, the drop coincided with a massive platform shift. More than 63% of users accessed these AI tools on mobile devices. OpenAI launched its iOS app in May and its Android app in July, effectively siphoning millions of browser sessions straight into native apps.

Demographically, the US drove 22.62% of all traffic, followed by Europe with 3.9 billion visits. Conversational bots accounted for 19.1 billion of the total 24 billion visits, while the user base skewed heavily male at 69.5%.

Why it matters

This data cuts right through the promotional noise and shows what regular consumers actually care about.

For builders, the honeymoon phase of spinning up a web-based wrapper and riding novelty hype is over. General-purpose attention is almost entirely monopolized by ChatGPT. Conversational agents dominate over 75% of the market, proving that people still view text generation as the primary way to interact with AI.

It also highlights the urgency of mobile-first distribution. When nearly two-thirds of your audience is on a phone, tools that stay tethered to desktop browsers or third-party setups like Discord will gradually leak mindshare to slick native apps.

In our view, the summer traffic pullback wasn't an AI crash; it was a transition from tourist browsing to habitual use. If you are not building an infrastructure giant, the only viable playbook left is hyper-targeted community and persona depth, exactly like Character AI proved.