[DigitalToday reporter Chi-gyu Hwang (황치규)] Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) released a series called The Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps, showing which generative AI services the public uses.

a16z selected the top 50 apps each based on monthly visits and monthly active users, using data from web traffic analytics firm Similarweb and mobile app analytics firm Sensor Tower. The metrics cited are as of January.

Starting with this series, the scope of analysis expands beyond AI-native companies to services strengthening generative AI, including CapCut, Canva, Notion, Picsart, Freepik and Grammarly. a16z said this was to provide a more objective picture.

CapCut, a video-editing app with 736 million monthly mobile active users, relies on AI for popular features such as background removal, AI effects, auto captions and text-to-video generation. Canva built growth momentum around Magic Suite, an AI tool collection.

Notion’s usage rate for its paid AI add-on service surged to more than 50 percent from 20 percent in a year, and it now accounts for about half of the company’s AI annual recurring revenue, a16z said.

A standout finding in the series is that ChatGPT still leads, but competition is becoming increasingly intense. Based on web traffic, ChatGPT is 2.7 times larger than second-ranked Gemini. On mobile by MAU, ChatGPT is about twice Gemini’s size.

ChatGPT users expanded over the past year from 500 million to about 900 million, but rivals Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude also saw faster growth in paid subscribers in the United States. The data show an increase in multi-tenanting among users, with about 20 percent of weekly ChatGPT web users also using Gemini in the same week.

Google expanded its user base by strengthening creative functions. Nano Banana generated 200 million images in its first week after launch, attracting 10 million new users to Gemini, and Veo 3 was seen as a turning point in AI video. Anthropic focused on the prosumer market through Cowork, Claude for Chrome, plugins for Excel and PowerPoint, and especially Claude Code.

Competition among general-purpose AI chatbots is also expanding into app stores. OpenAI and Anthropic both introduced connector ecosystems that let users build workflows within chatbots. But the two companies have different priorities.

ChatGPT has more than 85 apps in areas such as travel, shopping, food, health and wellness, lifestyle and entertainment, but Claude has little presence in these consumer areas. Claude is skewed toward services aimed at professionals.

a16z said, "If AI assistants evolve beyond simple chat windows into operating environments, competition will look more like the mobile OS war, in which two platforms with very different philosophies each built $1 trillion ecosystems, than the search war where a single company took 90 percent of the market."

The data also show clear geographic differences in the use of generative AI apps. The analysis said the generative AI app market breaks into three distinct ecosystems when measured by region.

Western AI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity count the United States, India, Brazil, Britain and Indonesia as major markets, but have little presence in China or Russia. Doubao from TikTok parent ByteDance and Kimi from Moonshot AI draw major user bases in their home market of China. Chinese AI startup DeepSeek is singled out as the only service to secure users evenly across a variety of regions.

DeepSeek web traffic is spread across China (33.5 percent), Russia (7.1 percent) and the United States (6.6 percent), and mobile showed a similar pattern. Creative tools remained dominant in the top 100 genAI consumer apps, but there were major changes compared with three years ago.

In September 2023, 7 of 9 creative tools included on the web list were image-generation AIs such as Midjourney, DALL-E and Stable Diffusion. This year, creative tools numbered 7, but image-generation AIs were only 3. The remaining slots were filled by products related to video, music and voice.

Changes were also pronounced in video-generation AI. Kling AI, Hailuo and Pixverse all showed growth, and Chinese models have steadily held the lead in output quality, a16z said.

Interest in vibe coding also remained. The top 100 genAI consumer apps list included Replit and Lovable, as well as Claude Code. But the open-source AI agent tool OpenClaw, which recently drew interest, was not included because it is not a product ordinary consumers can handle.

Desktop-only AI tools also emerged as a keyword drawing attention. They posted rapid growth, particularly among developers. Claude Code, a command-line agent for developers, grew to $1 billion in annual revenue within six months of launch, and OpenAI also released a Codex app for Mac. Cursor also continues to appear on the list of the top 50 web services.