Anthropic's Claude is rapidly gaining ground in the consumer AI market, becoming the third-most visited AI service on the web and nearing 1 billion monthly visits, according to Andreessen Horowitz's latest consumer AI report.
ChatGPT remains far ahead of its rivals, with more than 1 billion monthly active users on mobile and a much larger base of paid subscribers in the US. Andreessen Horowitz, also known as a16z, estimates that ChatGPT has about three times as many US consumer paid subscribers as Claude or Google's Gemini.
Claude and Gemini are now competing closely on paid subscriptions. Gemini's subscriber base has grown after Google moved existing paid users to its AI plan, keeping it close to Claude in the race for consumer monetisation.
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However, traffic alone is not translating into widespread paid adoption. The a16z report found that nearly half of US consumers now use AI, but only about 25% interact with AI tools daily.
The seventh edition of our Top 100 Consumer AI Apps is here. New this time: a revenue leaderboard, alongside the usual web and mobile traffic rankings. Three years ago we published the first edition. ChatGPT was #1, Claude was unranked, and the entire category was chatbots, image generators, and not much else. In today's edition: - ChatGPT still holds the throne, now with 1B+ monthly actives on mobile - Claude has climbed to #3 on web with nearly 1B monthly visits - The category has expanded to vibe coding (Lovable, Cursor, Replit), music (Suno), design (Figma), voice (ElevenLabs), video (Higgsfield, Kling), agents (Manus), and even hardware (Plaud) Full breakdown from @omooretweets: https://t.co/J9edFBQvCN
— a16z (@a16z) October 5, 2026
As of August, just 4.5% had an active paid personal subscription to ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude.
Spending is also concentrated among a relatively small group. The top 10% of consumer AI spenders account for around half of observed spending, with coding, productivity and creative applications driving much of that demand.
The report also pointed to a gap between engagement and monetisation. YipitData data showed weaker average daily sessions for Claude in July and August, alongside slower subscriber additions and higher churn in its US e-receipt panel.
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ChatGPT, meanwhile, regained momentum after several product launches in July, reinforcing its lead across most US states.
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