Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) has released its fifth report analyzing the consumer AI landscape, highlighting the evolving usage of AI products over the past two and a half years, as rivals to ChatGPT gain ground.
The report identifies 14 companies that have consistently appeared in the top AI products list across all five reports: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Poe, Character AI, Midjourney, Leonardo, Veed, Cutout, ElevenLabs, Photoroom, Gamma, QuillBot, Civitai, and Hugging Face. These companies represent diverse applications of AI, including general assistance, companionship, image and video editing, voice generation, productivity, and model hosting. Additionally, five companies have appeared on all but the first report: Claude, DeepAI, Janitor AI, Pixelcut, and Suno, covering general AI use, companionship, image editing, and music generation.
Notably, Google has significantly increased its presence on the list of top generative AI consumer web products, securing four spots for the first time with Gemini, AI Studio, NotebookLM, and Google Labs. These products now operate on separate domains, enabling independent tracking of their growth.
The a16z report leverages data from third-party market intelligence firms such as Similarweb for web product analysis and Sensor Tower for mobile app data. A key finding is that Gemini, ranked second, is narrowing the gap with ChatGPT on mobile devices, although it has approximately half the monthly active users. Gemini’s adoption is particularly strong on Android, accounting for nearly 90% of its monthly active user base. On the web, Gemini also holds the second position behind ChatGPT, capturing about 12% of ChatGPT’s website visits.
Google’s AI Studio, a platform for developers to experiment with Gemini models, has entered the top 10 list of AI web products, ranking 10th. NotebookLM secured the 13th position, while Google Labs, a hub for Google’s AI experiments, is ranked 39th.
The report also points to the growing influence of Meta AI and Grok. Grok ranked fourth on the web and 23rd on mobile, demonstrating rapid growth from having no standalone app at the end of 2024 to boasting over 20 million monthly active users. Grok experienced a nearly 40% increase in usage in July 2025 following the release of Grok 4.
Meta AI, however, ranked 46th on the web and did not appear on the list of top mobile AI apps, potentially impacted by news regarding the public sharing of some users’ posts without consent.
DeepSeek and Claude experienced flattened growth on mobile, with DeepSeek declining by 22% from its peak. DeepSeek also faced a more significant drop on the web, falling over 40% from its February 2025 peak. In contrast, Perplexity and Claude continued to expand their user base.
Several Chinese AI developers have also gained prominence in the top 20 on the web, including Quark (9th), Alibaba’s AI assistant (47th on mobile); Doubao (12th), ByteDance’s general LLM product (4th on mobile); and Kimi (17th), a chatbot from Moonshot AI. These platforms primarily cater to the Chinese market, with over 75% of their traffic originating from China.
Seven additional companies featured on the web list, while developed in China, have successfully exported their AI technology globally: DeepSeek, Hailuo, Kling, SeaArt, Cutout Pro, Manus, and Monica.
On the mobile front, 22 of the top 50 apps were developed in China, although only three are primarily used within China. Key players in this category include Meitu (Photo & Video Editor, BeautyPlus, BeautyCam, Wink, and Airbrush), ByteDance (Doubao and Cici), Gauth, and Hypic.
Newcomers Lovable and Replit have also made their debut on the main list, gaining traction through websites built and published on their platforms without custom domains (replit.app and lovable.app, respectively).
Andreessen Horowitz also identified AI apps poised to break into the top ranks, including PixAI, Bolt, Blackbox AI, Clipchamp, and Getliner on the web, and Talkie, Seekee, Photo AI, AI Mirror, and Arvin on mobile.
The report highlights a significant increase in newcomers on the mobile list (14), attributed to app stores’ stricter enforcement against ChatGPT clones, creating opportunities for more original apps to emerge.
