• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, Yesterday

Is the advertising industry living through AI's version of the Big Bang?

Recent data compares the cosmic Big Bang to events in advertising such as the AI chatbot explosion that is reshaping the ways humans interact with technology.

Many of those interactions are positive, but many are negative, pushing the explosive content of the Milky Way to another galaxy within the Earth's universe.

Onelittleweb, publisher of the data, estimates the market has more than 10,500 AI tools generating nearly 100 billion estimated web visits.

Ten chatbots combined account for 58.8% of all AI web traffic — suggesting that despite the expanding universe of tools, this group of platforms dominates user attention.

Growth for the top ten rose 123.35% in web traffic year-over-year (YoY) as of July 2025, adding 30.9 billion new visits compared to the previous year.

If these companies relied on time spent with the chatbots to drive advertising, Anthropic's Claude would dominate.

In the study, Claude led with the highest average use time of 16:44 minutes per visit among the top 10, and Microsoft Copilot ranked the lowest, while Google Gemini ranked just above Microsoft.

The report ranks ChatGPT at the top overall, with visits rising by 106% YoY, from 22.6 billion to 46.6 billion.

As of July 2025, ChatGPT accounts for 48.36% of all AI web traffic among more than 10,500 available tools. The next nine chatbots combined make up 10.45%.

The data ranks Grok at No. 2 across eight criteria, earning its position through high month-over-month (MoM) and YoY traffic growth, strong media citations, long average usage duration, and a significant volume of app-store reviews.

DeepSeek rose to prominence and then fell. It peaked at 520 million visits in February 2025, and its web traffic declined steadily to 314.6 million by July, down 39.5% in five months.

China may build technology that is less expensive and at a pace that is faster than the rest of the world, but that doesn’t mean the products are better. Many of those products are less reliable and less scalable than those created elsewhere, including TikTok -- in my opinion, because there are hidden connections to the Chinese government. 

Gemini racked up more than 1.7 billion web visits in the past 12 months, up 156% YoY. Its average monthly visits for this period were 138.6 million, with the quarter between May and July 2025 reaching an average of 246.2 million. Gemini has emerged as ChatGPT’s closest rival, though its traffic remains 28 times smaller as of July 2025.

Onelittleweb studied more than 10,500 AI tools on the market, and ranked the top 10 AI chatbots of 2025 based on measurable data from sources such as Semrush, Muckrack, aitools.xyz, and app stores. The data focused on visibility and awareness, momentum, and user experience.