• by Joe Mandese , 3 hours ago

Like any media brand -- or pretty much any brand at all -- a new study finds a strong correlation between media references to the major AI chatbots and visits to their websites.

The "AI Big Bang Study 2025" from web analytics firm Onelittleweb finds that with the exception of Perplexity, chatbots that were mentioned most in media references over the 12-month perios through July of this year generated corresponding visits to their websites.

Perplexity's results shouldn't be that, well, perplexing, because it is a search engine model, meaning it probably generates lots of repeat visits from users once they start using it, regardless of what the media is -- or is not -- saying about it.

That said, the study's overall findings are that ChatGPT continues to dominate the field both in terms of media references and visits, and its growth continues to accelerate, although xAI's Grok currently is the fastest-rising star among the pack.

And if you look at the actual monthly growth curves (see below) DeepSeek was a rapid rise-and-fall story.