ChatGPT stands head and shoulders above all other AI Chatbots, but users engage for longest with Claude. These findings come from the "AI Big Bang Study" conducted by OneLittleWeb.

Introducing the study, Sujan Sarkar, CEO and co-founder of onelittleweb.com said:

Just as the cosmic Big Bang gave rise to the universe, we’re now witnessing an AI chatbot explosion that’s reshaping how the world interacts with technology.

To provide a definitive, data-driven list of the best AI chatbots of 2005, the study concentrated on the top 10 chatbots in a market of over 10,500 AI tools that generated nearly 100 billion estimated web visits in the period August 2024 to July 2025.

According to Sarkar:

Together, these 10 chatbots account for 58.8% of all AI web traffic — proving that in this fast-expanding AI universe, a small group of platforms now dominate the orbit of user attention.

Using 12 months of traffic, growth, and engagement data sourced from Semrush, Muck Rack, the App Store, and aitools.xyz the study used eight core metrics, grouped under visibility, momentum, and user experience with produce an index in which ChatGPT scored 0.81, almost twice that of its nearest rival Grok (0.42).

In terms of number of web visits ChatGPT is even further ahead of the pack with 46.6 billion visits compared to 2.7B for DeepSeek the next Chatbot on this metric. Indeed the visits for the other nine Chatbots sums to less than 5 billion. DeepSeek, however, proved to be "a flash in the pan". It peaked at 0.52B in the month of February and then monthly traffic declined by 40% in the following 5 months. By contrast ChatGPT continued to show month-on-month growth to average 5B per month in the latest quarter.

While it is no surprise that ChatGPT comes top, I was surprised to see that Grok, the Chatbot launched by Elon Musk's xAI in November 2023, came second. You have to remember, however, that this study is about Chatbot interaction between general web users rather than their use by developers for whom Grok is irrelevant. Grok's key feature is real-time access to information from X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter and is known for its "rebellious streak" and willingness to answer "spicy questions" that other AI chatbots might avoid. It's high score in this study is also due to its strong month on month growth, which is turn is due to being the newest entrant to the market.

As far as developers are concerned GitHub Copilot comes in second place in terms of usage according to the 2025 Stack Overflow Survey and is completely ignored in the AI Big Bang Study, although its enterprise-oriented cousin Microsoft Copilot comes a very respectable #6, with an index of 0.20. This score is perhaps unfairly depressed by the fact it comes last in terms of the length of time users spend it. Rather than lack of engagement, which is how the metric interprets it, this could be seen as an advantage in terms of productivity. 

Gemini comes in third place for both Stack Overflow and OneLittleWeb, where it has an overall index of 0.32, again possibly a score that is depressed by a short session length. A key finding from the study is that:

With continued growth and platform improvements, Gemini is emerging as ChatGPT’s closest rival, though its traffic remains 28 times smaller as of July 2025.

Claude Code is in #4 on Stack Overflow while Claude is in the same position in the AI Big Bang study. Claude comes top highest average usage time of 16:44 minutes per visit. This is interpreted by OneLittleWeb as signaling deeper user engagement. However, spending longer with Claude than with other AI chatbots could just be because users have more complex questions for Claude as it is characterized by good reasoning capabilities.

More Information

The AI Big Bang Study 2025

onelittleweb.com 

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