AI Tool Popularity: A Look at the Top 20 Tools in 2024
The Challenge of Measuring AI Popularity
Measuring the popularity of AI tools can be a complex task, as AI can be a standalone tool or embedded deeply in other products. For example, the generative fill tool in Photoshop is very popular, but it won’t show up in any public AI tool metrics.
Exploding Topics’ Approach
To determine AI tool popularity, Exploding Topics analyzed trends based on web searches, conversations, and mentions. They collected data from two reliable web analytics platforms, Semrush and Similarweb, and calculated total traffic volume for 20 tools. The data is from August and indicative of overall 2024 performance, especially since ChatGPT was and remains a strongly dominant market leader.
Top 10 Performance Leaders by Market Share
Here are the top 10 performance leaders by market share:
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ChatGPT – market share 54.96%
ChatGPT is the OG of generative AI services, with enormous investment behind it and an ever-growing war chest from its sales of services. It recently announced its text-to-video application, Sora, and a $200/mo service for those who can’t get enough of that tasty AI goodness. -
Canva – market share 14.92%
Canva, a popular web-based image editing and marketing tool, has gone big into AI features, including a tool that automatically generates templates, background removal, automatic resizing to fit various social media formats, content suggestions, and text-to-image. -
DeepL – market share 5.38%
DeepL is an online translation service that translates 33 languages, offers AI-powered edits, and can translate files including PDFs, Word documents, and PowerPoint decks. The company pitches its services as a "Language AI platform" that can integrate into a wide range of applications. -
Google Gemini – market share 4.75%
Google Gemini has recently received a slew of upgrades as part of the Gemini 2.0 introduction. While the product hasn’t performed well in my programming tests, Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai reports that "Our AI Overviews now reach 1 billion people." Those metrics may not be measurable by Semrush and Similarweb, which may be why its share numbers are lower than expected. -
Character.AI – market share 3.90%
Character.AI allows users to create customized chatbots that simulate certain personalities. Because people are people, Character.AI has become quite controversial for what it allows and for what people have tried to do with their virtual characters. -
Remove.bg – market share 1.76%
Remove.bg removes backgrounds from pictures. Sure, iOS and MacOS do that. Photoshop does that. Many apps do that. But hey, here’s a simple web app that does fairly high-quality background removal, blurs backgrounds, and lets you add new backgrounds. It’s a fee-based service, and since so many basic OS features are now beginning to add background removal, we’re guessing that market share will probably drop over the next year. -
JanitorAI – market share 1.72%
JanitorAI (I can’t fully get over the name) is another AI character generator, but this one focuses more on online role-playing than on deeper characterizations. You can’t see much from the site without logging in, but from the recent activity page that’s publicly presented, it appears many of the users are creating anime-style characters. -
QuillBot – market share 1.68%
QuillBot bills itself as an online writing assistant, with a variety of tools including a grammar checker, plagiarism checker, AI detector, paraphraser, summarizer, citation generator, translator, and a tool called "Flow" that’s essentially an AI-equipped word processor. -
Grammarly – market share 1.66%
Grammarly existed long before the current generative AI boom. It was launched in 2009 in Kyiv, Ukraine, as a subscription service for students to help with grammar and spelling. Today, Grammarly is a fully-fleshed-out writing assistant that checks and suggests spelling, grammar, tone, and style and warns of possible plagiarism. - Claude – market share 1.57%
Anthropic, the company behind Claude, has been making a bunch of very big deals. It boasts a $4 billion investment from Amazon (with the intent that Claude will power "remarkable Alexa"), a $2 billion investment from Google, and an integration with Slack. That said, the 3.5 Sonnet version of Claude didn’t do all that well in my programming tests.
The Under 1.5% Club
All the services in this batch have market shares under 1.5%. You may find some unexpected names there (or not find some you may expect). I’ll discuss my observations after we get through this lightning round of the Under 1.5% Club.
Conclusion
ChatGPT as the clear winner is completely expected. But what this list reminds us about is that AIs aren’t just chatbots. Of the top five, only two are what we would now call "traditional" prompt-to-text chatbots. The other three perform translation, graphics support, and create characters. Also, Google’s AI podcast tool transforms your text into stunningly lifelike audio – for free.
FAQs
Q: What is the purpose of measuring AI tool popularity?
A: Measuring AI tool popularity helps us understand the market trends and adoption rates of various AI tools.
Q: How did Exploding Topics measure AI tool popularity?
A: Exploding Topics analyzed trends based on web searches, conversations, and mentions, and collected data from two reliable web analytics platforms, Semrush and Similarweb, and calculated total traffic volume for 20 tools.
Q: What are some notable trends in AI tool popularity?
A: Some notable trends include the dominance of ChatGPT, the increasing adoption of AI tools for translation, graphics support, and character creation, and the growing competition in the market.
Q: What does the future hold for AI tool popularity?
A: The future of AI tool popularity will likely be shaped by the development of new AI technologies, the increasing adoption of AI in various industries, and the growing competition in the market.
