The most popular AI tools of 2024 (and what that even means)

Popularity in the tech world is hard to measure. I’ve talked at length about this in my discussions of programming language popularity. It really comes down to what you use to measure popularity — and how available those metrics are to those doing the analysis.

When it comes to AI, that’s even more of a challenge because AI can be a stand-alone tool or can be embedded deeply in other products. For example, the generative fill tool in Photoshop is very popular (and I quickly found it to be indispensable), but it won’t show up in any public AI tool metrics.

Also: I’m an AI tools expert, and these are the only two I pay for

Exploding Topics is a company that analyzes trends based on web searches, conversations and mentions. It recently took on the challenge of determining AI tool popularity. Its approach was to collect data from two reliable web analytics platforms, Semrush and Similarweb, and calculate total traffic volume for 20 tools.

The data is from August and is indicative of overall 2024 performance, especially since ChatGPT was and remains such a strongly dominant market leader.

Let’s look at the top ten performance leaders by market share. As the chart above shows, share numbers dropped rapidly once we are out of the top five.

1. ChatGPT – market share 54.96%

ChatGPT is, of course, the OG of generative AI services. In many ways, it’s still the best, with enormous investment behind it, and an ever-growing war chest from its sales of services. Just recently, it announced its text-to-video application, Sora, and a $200/mo service for those who just can’t get enough of that tasty AI goodness.

2. Canva – market share 14.92%

Canva, a popular web-based image editing and marketing tool, has gone big into AI features, including a tool that automatically generates templates, background removal, automatic resizing to fit various social media formats, content suggestions, and text-to-image.

3. DeepL – market share 5.38%

DeepL is an online translation service that translates 33 languages, offers AI-powered edits, and can translate files including PDFs, Word documents, and PowerPoint decks. The company pitches its services as a “Language AI platform” that can integrate into a wide range of applications.

4. Google Gemini – market share 4.75%

Google Gemini has just received a whole slew of upgrades as part of the Gemini 2.0 introduction last week. While the product hasn’t performed all that well in my programming tests, Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai reports that, “Our Al Overviews now reach 1 billion people.” Those metrics may not be measurable by Semrush and Similarweb, which may be why its share numbers are lower than you’d expect given Pichai’s boast.

5. Character.Al – market share 3.90%

Character.AI allows users to create customized chatbots that simulate certain personalities. Because people are people, Character.AI has become quite controversial for what it allows, and for what people have tried to do to with their virtual characters. So, you know, if the AIs do decide to take over the world and destroy humanity, they’ll be able to cite this site for justification.

6. Remove.bg – market share 1.76%

Remove.bg removes backgrounds from pictures. Sure, iOS and MacOS do that. Photoshop does that. Many apps do that. But hey, here’s a simple web app that does fairly high-quality background removal, blurs backgrounds, and lets you add new backgrounds. It’s a fee-based service, and since so many basic OS features are now beginning to add background removal, we’re guessing that market share will probably drop over the next year.

7. JanitorAI – market share 1.72%

JanitorAI (I can’t fully get over the name) is another AI character generator, but this one focuses more on online role playing than on deeper character characterizations. You can’t see much from the site without logging in, but from the recent activity page that’s publicly presented, it appears many of the users are creating anime-style characters.

8. QuillBot – market share 1.68%

QuillBot bills itself as an online writing assistant, with a variety of tools including a grammar checker, plagiarism checker, AI detector, paraphraser, summarizer, citation generator, translator, and a tool called “Flow” that’s essentially an AI-equipped word processor. I tested QuillBot in my AI detector shootout, and it got an 80% correct score.

9. Grammarly – market share 1.66%

Grammarly existed long before the current generative AI boom. It was launched in 2009 in Kyiv, Ukraine, as a subscription service for students to help with grammar and spelling. Today, Grammarly is a fully-fleshed-out writing assistant that checks and suggests spelling, grammar, tone, and style and warns of possible plagiarism. We tested Grammarly’s beta AI detector, and it didn’t do all that well, scoring just a 40% accuracy result.

10. Claude – market share 1.57%

Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, has been making a bunch of very big deals. It boasts a $4 billion investment from Amazon (with the intent that Claude will power “remarkable Alexa”), a $2 billion investment from Google, and an integration with Slack. That said, the 3.5 Sonnet version of Claude didn’t do all that well in my programming tests.

The under 1.5% club

All of the services in our next batch have market shares under 1.5%. You may find some unexpected names there (or not find some you may expect). I’ll discuss my observations after we get through this lightning round of the Under 1.5% Club.

My take

ChatGPT as the clear winner is completely expected. But what this list reminds us about is that AIs aren’t just chatbots. Of the top five, only two are what we would now call “traditional” prompt-to-text chatbots. The other three perform translation, graphics support, and create characters.

Also: Google’s AI podcast tool transforms your text into stunningly lifelike audio – for free

To some degree, I was surprised to see Microsoft’s Copilot down in the Under 1.5% Club. That said, Copilot now permeates much of Microsoft’s offerings and it’s hard to pin it down as one monolithic beast for the purpose of measurement. That said, Bing isn’t Google and Copilot isn’t ChatGPT (or Gemini, for that matter).

Some services I’ve spent a lot of time with, like Midjourney and Notion’s AI, didn’t show up at all. Midjourney spent most of its time as a Discord channel and only recently had a web interface. Tools like Notion AI live inside other products and may not stand alone enough to be visible to a survey like this.

Way, way back, in the most ancient of times (1986), I wrote an article entitled “Artificial Intelligence as a systems component,” for the long-defunct Computer Design magazine. At that time, my thesis was that AI would find its way inside many applications, to the point where it would just be a component of a much larger offering.

Also: 25 AI tips to boost your programming productivity with ChatGPT

To an extent, I was right. Copilot’s features and Notion AI are just add-ons to another marquee offering. What I didn’t realize at the time (because I was AI decades before AI was cool) was that AI would become a high-value marketing buzzword.

Of course, back then, AI was a lot of work, showed only limited value, and wasn’t available to muggles. Now, with ChatGPT and other offerings, it’s become very mainstream and it’s widely apparent that AI will change pretty much everything.

So, as we transition from 2024 to 2025, expect AI to become even more of a hot topic. If 2023 was the year of “gee, check out what this can do” and 2024 the year of “let me get some of that,” 2025 will be the year when solutions solidify, and AI gets more integrated into business and personal activities.

In 2025, expect to see some fallout both from the inevitable chilling effects of this technology and from companies who over-reached, over-bragged, over-promised, and under-delivered.

Also: AI is moving undercover at work in 2025, according to Deloitte’s Tech Trends report

Also expect to see ChatGPT continue to get stronger, but so too will Gemini and Copilot. Neither Google nor Microsoft are accustomed to or willing to be upstaged by rivals, so we can expect their offerings to become more of the solid, reliable solutions both companies are known for.

As for Apple, Amazon, and Meta, the jury is still out. Meta sure seems to get it, while Alexa hasn’t changed all that much in terms of intelligence since its inception, and Siri is still as stubbornly unhelpful as it was when it debuted. Will these three step more strongly into the AI spotlight with game-changing offerings? What do you think? Let us know in the comments below.

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