1.3%<\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
Source: Similarweb via Momentic, May 2026. Share of combined web visits across the seven largest general-purpose standalone assistants.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
The quarter-by-quarter movement matters as much as the snapshot. From February to May 2026, Claude grew fastest at +228% in web visits, followed by DeepSeek (+58%, rebounding from a February trough to 430 million visits), then Gemini and Copilot. Grok and Perplexity declined, and ChatGPT was roughly flat. And by Sensor Tower’s broader app-based metric, ChatGPT’s global user share fell below 50% for the first time ever in March, landing at 46.4% by May.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
\n
89%<\/div>\n
Share of all time spent in AI assistant apps that goes to just the top three platforms, per Sensor Tower. Twenty players make this list, but attention is brutally concentrated at the top, and the categories below the giants (companions, content tools, regional apps) are still wide open.<\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
\n
The Full Ranking<\/div>\n
<\/span>The Top 20 AI Chatbots, July 2026<\/span><\/h2>\nRanked by best-available monthly user estimates, with one honest caveat: no two platforms count users the same way. Embedded assistants inherit their host app’s audience, Chinese platforms report cumulative or domestic figures, and several players simply don’t disclose. Where a number is contested, the range or metric is noted. Treat the order as directional, and the stories as the point.<\/p>\n
\n
\n
#<\/div>\n
Platform<\/div>\n
Est. Users<\/div>\n
The Story<\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
\n
1<\/div>\n
Meta AI
Meta<\/span><\/div>\n1.2B MAU<\/div>\n
The biggest audience in AI and the least chosen. Embedded in WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook, so most of its users never downloaded a thing. Invisible on every web-traffic chart.<\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
\n
2<\/div>\n
ChatGPT
OpenAI<\/span><\/div>\n1.1B MAU<\/div>\n
Still the default. Fastest app ever to 1 billion monthly users, 900M weekly actives, 2.5B daily prompts. But web share fell from 79% to 53.9% in a year, and ads plus shopping are now live to pay for it all.<\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
\n
3<\/div>\n
Gemini
Google<\/span><\/div>\n900M+ MAU<\/div>\n
Added ~550M app users in 13 months by riding Search, Android, and Workspace. AI Overviews reach 2B+ people monthly, and a custom Gemini model powers Apple’s rebuilt Siri on iOS 27.<\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
\n
4<\/div>\n
Copilot
Microsoft<\/span><\/div>\n~420M MAU<\/div>\n
The enterprise bundle. Lives inside Office with FedRAMP compliance, runs GPT-5.6 and increasingly Claude too. But the consumer app is bleeding: US mobile daily actives down roughly 60% year to date.<\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
\n
5<\/div>\n
Doubao
ByteDance<\/span><\/div>\n330M users<\/div>\n
China’s #1 AI app, running the TikTok playbook: multimodal everything, aggressive pricing, even an AI-native phone that sold out. Added paid tiers in May 2026. Its engine processes 120 trillion tokens a day.<\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
\n
6<\/div>\n
Claude
Anthropic<\/span><\/div>\n245M MAU<\/div>\n
Smallest audience of the giants, biggest business. $47B revenue run rate, 13% paid conversion (double anyone else), fastest web growth of 2026 at +855% YoY, and the world’s most valuable AI company behind it.<\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
\n
7<\/div>\n
Yuanbao
Tencent<\/span><\/div>\n150M MAU<\/div>\n
Tencent’s Hunyuan-powered assistant with one-tap access inside WeChat chats, groups, and Mini Programs. Distribution that no company outside China can replicate.<\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
\n
8<\/div>\n
Grok
xAI \/ SpaceX<\/span><\/div>\n117M MAU<\/div>\n
Rode X integration from 1.9% to 17.8% of the US mobile market in a year, then plateaued. Now a product line inside a $2T+ public rocket company, with 550,000 GPUs waiting for a Grok 5 that keeps slipping.<\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
\n
9<\/div>\n
Perplexity
Perplexity AI<\/span><\/div>\n34M to 100M+<\/div>\n
The answer engine that killed its own ads business in February and watched revenue jump 50% the next month. Its Computer agent now lives inside Microsoft 365, and every answer cites its sources.<\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
\n
10<\/div>\n
DeepSeek
High-Flyer<\/span><\/div>\n~33M app MAU<\/div>\n
The open-source shockwave of 2025 is now the value pick of 2026. V4 Pro scores within four GPQA points of GPT-5.5 at roughly an eighth of the price, and web visits rebounded 58% in a quarter to 430M.<\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
\n
11<\/div>\n
Qwen
Alibaba<\/span><\/div>\nTop-5 China app<\/div>\n
The open-weights leader. Qwen3-Max tops LiveBench at 70.3, ahead of models costing multiples more, and it’s the default self-hosted model for a generation of developers on Hugging Face.<\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
\n
12<\/div>\n
Kimi
Moonshot AI<\/span><\/div>\nNot disclosed<\/div>\n
The long-context champion. Its 2-million-token context window is the longest in production anywhere, and K2 Thinking chains 200 to 300 tool calls per task. Landed a US App Store release in May 2026.<\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
\n
13<\/div>\n
Ernie Bot
Baidu<\/span><\/div>\nNot disclosed<\/div>\n
China’s first mover, now its enterprise and government workhorse. Fell out of the consumer top five it once led, but remains the compliance-safe pick for regulated Chinese industries.<\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
\n
14<\/div>\n
Le Chat
Mistral AI<\/span><\/div>\n<45M EU recipients<\/div>\n
Europe’s flagship. Mistral is valued at €11.7B, cleared $400M+ in annualized revenue, targets $1B by year-end, and just borrowed $830M for 13,800 Nvidia chips near Paris. The sovereignty pick for EU enterprises.<\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
\n
15<\/div>\n
Character.AI
Character Technologies<\/span><\/div>\n20M MAU<\/div>\n
The engagement king. Sessions average 17+ minutes across 20 million daily conversations and a library of 5 million characters. Down from a 28M peak, but still #6 in Cloudflare’s generative AI ranking.<\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
\n
16<\/div>\n
GitHub Copilot
Microsoft<\/span><\/div>\nNot disclosed<\/div>\n
The coding incumbent, still #7 in Cloudflare’s generative AI ranking. Its problem has a name: Claude Code overtook it as the most-used AI coding tool within 8 months of launching.<\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
\n
17<\/div>\n
My AI
Snapchat<\/span><\/div>\nEmbedded<\/div>\n
Sits in front of Snapchat’s hundreds of millions of users, mostly Gen Z. The big upgrade is coming: a Perplexity integration reportedly worth $400 million is slated for 2026.<\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
\n
18<\/div>\n
Cici \/ Dola
ByteDance<\/span><\/div>\nNot disclosed<\/div>\n
Doubao’s international twin, quietly gaining traction in emerging markets where $20-a-month subscriptions are a non-starter. ByteDance’s second front in the AI war.<\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
\n
19<\/div>\n
Poe
Quora<\/span><\/div>\nNot disclosed<\/div>\n
The aggregator: one subscription, every major model. Genuinely useful, but structurally squeezed as every lab builds its own model picker and multi-model features.<\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
\n
20<\/div>\n
Pi
Inflection AI<\/span><\/div>\nFaded<\/div>\n
The companion pioneer and this list’s cautionary tale. After Microsoft hired away its founders, Inflection pivoted to enterprise and Pi drifted into maintenance mode. Great product, no distribution.<\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
\n
Reading The Board<\/div>\n
<\/span>Four Games Being Played On One Board<\/span><\/h2>\nThe top 20 isn’t one competition. It’s four different games, and each tier wins on a different resource.<\/p>\n