ISTANBUL

US-based OpenAI’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT was the most popular AI tool with 4.7 billion monthly visits in January, according to the AITools website.

ChatGPT saw a decline in monthly visitor traffic with the launch of China’s DeepSeek, but it remained at the top of the list by AITools, including generative AI tools and other tools that have AI-powered features.

Canva, an online graphic design app, ranked second with 887 million monthly visits, while Google Translate followed with 595 million.

China’s DeepSeek caused a major decline in US AI chatbot use and the US stock market with its release, as the R1 reasoning model, a competitive rival to ChatGPT’s premium offering, was released with completely open-source code for free.

DeepSeek’s number of monthly users rose over 2,000% to 268 million in January, showing the fastest monthly visitor growth among other AI tools, while at the same time the number of ChatGPT users fell 2%.

CharacterAI ranked fifth with 226 million, followed by JanitorAI with 200 million, Perplexity with 133 million, and Google’s Gemini with 118 million monthly users.

Gemini’s number of visitors fell over 9% in January with the prominence of DeepSeek.

Remove.bg and Claude had 112 million and 105 million monthly users, respectively.

As the AI race between the US and China intensified, the list showed that only one Chinese company made it to the top 10, while the rest were US-based tools.