The a16z Show - The Top 100 Most Used AI Apps in 2025

Starting point is 00:00:01 Today on the podcast, we're joined by A16Z partners, Olivia Moore, and Justine Moore, to get the latest consumer AI-100, their biannual ranking of the most used AI-native products across web and mobile. They discuss how real users are adopting, what's fading, and where the next wave of opportunities might be. Let's get into it. Hi, I'm Justine. And I'm Olivia. And welcome back to the A16Cd podcast. Today, we're going to be discussing the Consumer AI Top 100 list. So, Olivia, let's start because you are compiling the list and you've been doing this for a while.

Starting point is 00:00:38 What is this list and kind of what's the purpose of it? So this is our fifth time doing this list. We do it every six months. We started at basically the dawn of the consumer gen AI era. And the purpose is just to get a sense of what real consumers are actually using an AI. As a sample set, we take every website and every mobile app in the entire world. And we sort them in descending order of usage. So for websites, this is monthly visits globally.

Starting point is 00:01:03 For mobile apps, this is monthly active users. We use similar web and sensor towers, these two data sources. And then we grab the top 50 from each of those sources that are AI-native companies. So you'll notice that this captures usage, not revenue. So it's not paid usage only. It's all usage, even people who are using the products for free, which to me gives an even better and I think kind of more real sense of what is capturing consumer imagination and AI.

Starting point is 00:01:30 Totally, yeah. I feel like a common question we often get as folks who are consumer investors in AI is what are people doing on AI besides chat. What should I see? What should I be doing? That too, yeah. And so I feel like these lists are a really helpful way for folks to get a sense of what are some of the use cases, what are some of the properties that are getting really big, getting a lot of users that you might not know about. And for a lot of people, sort of an inspiration list of what they want to try out. Let's talk about the new companies on the list because that's always exciting of like who craft. into the top 50 for web and the top 50 for mobile who weren't in the list before. Yeah. How would you describe the new companies? Were there any major changes?

Starting point is 00:02:07 Yeah. The web list, I think, is the best way to track changes over the time. The mobile list is a little bit less stable just because the app stores are constantly updating their policies on what's allowed. For our first couple mobile lists, it was just a wave of companies that were direct copycats of chat GPT. I remember that. Yeah. And all the companies were like chat GTP or chat and ask A.I. Chat, GBT, GBT, was a big one. Exactly. And so those were dominating the mobile list. So this time we had a lot of new companies on mobile as iOS ecosystem is cracked down on that.

Starting point is 00:02:39 But on the web list, we still did have 11 new names. Sounds like a lot out of 50, but it's actually a big reduction from, I think it was 17 new names six months ago. Wow. Which to me reflects the fact that the ecosystem is starting to stabilize a little bit more. There were still a couple of really exciting trends that popped out on this list that I would expect might continue and yield more new names. Vibe coding was one of them, which I think kind of burst into the forefront at the end of last year. So we saw it a little bit on our prior list in March, but it really kind of came into the forefront now.

Starting point is 00:03:15 So we have bolt on our brink list just below the top 50 cutoff. Awesome. And then we have both lovable and replet on the web list. In the past, a lot of the names on the list have been kind of in one of two categories, which is like general chat and companionship or creative tools, which I love. I spend a bunch of time in both of those categories, but it sounds like we're starting to see things like vibe coding

Starting point is 00:03:38 that are sort of outside of those two, what were really the killer use cases of consumer AI for a long time. We definitely are more in productivity as well, which we'll talk about. I will say companionship continues to just dominate. We actually did have three new companionship names, so juicy chat, joy and our dream, all made the list, alongside a bunch of others that have made the list before.

Starting point is 00:03:59 So character was the biggest name, janitor, spicy chat, polybuzz, crush on, A.D. And Kandy AI were all on this list and in the past. So that's a pretty notable section of the list that I think is dominated by companionship names, which is pretty interesting. For sure. And there's also a lot of big companies that have products on the list, folks like Google. Maybe you can talk a little bit about that because I think that's been a surprise. Yeah, Google had a big six months. And I would say especially their models and even their consumer-facing products had a really big six months.

Starting point is 00:04:30 The way they structured their domains in the past made it hard for us to include Google products on the list since we needed to be able to independently rank their traffic. So now we finally were able to, for the first time, and four unique Google properties made the web list. Wow. So Gemini was number two. It was right behind ChatGBT. It has just about 10% of Chat Chubit's traffic on web, but it's much closer on mobile. It's like half of ChatGBT's traffic on the mobile app, which is interesting. It's mostly Android users, which I think you would expect.

Starting point is 00:05:02 The other big debut for Google was a little more surprising to me. It's actually AI Studio, which is Google's developer-facing sandbox. So that's where engineers go when they want to build things and test out Google models. So that hit in the top 10 as well. And then right below the top 10 was Notebook LM at number 13. And I take your wow as a little bit of a surprise. which was a surprise to me too, and I think a bit of a narrative violation

Starting point is 00:05:27 that they went viral almost a year ago in September of 2024, but they've actually kept up their traffic every month of flat or increasing traffic. With the exception of this last month of summer when I think a lot of the academic usage caused it to decline, but just barely. And then one of your favorites also made the list,

Starting point is 00:05:48 which was Google Labs, down at number 39. This is kind of the consumer-facing sandbox for Google models, whereas AI Studios is a developer-facing sandbox. Google Labs includes V-O-3, the amazing new video model that you yourself have probably driven a big portion of the usage for it. I spent a lot of money on V-O-3. Yeah, exactly. And driven many visits, for sure.

Starting point is 00:06:10 And actually, Google Labs includes a bunch of other products like Dopple, which is their kind of outfit try-on products. Yes. It includes portrait, which is coaching. It includes... WISC, right? The image generation kind of sandbox, which is very cool and fun to play with. Exactly. Project Mariner, which is their agentic kind of browser sandbox.

Starting point is 00:06:28 Interesting. But my hunch is it's largely V-O-3 because traffic to that, to the Google Labs, spiked 15% in the month that V-O-3 was released, which is really exciting. Let's talk about the Chinese AI companies. So both new startups coming out of China, also big Chinese companies releasing models or consumer-facing properties. How are these ranking on the list? And what do you think is driven their growth? I mean, you could argue that China. Chinese companies show up in two or even three pretty interesting ways on the list. I would say the first one are companies or AI products that are built for China and used in China. And you might say why.

Starting point is 00:07:05 And it's because a lot of non-Chinese AI products like Chatch EBT and Claude are banned in China because they have to follow specific regulations and policies and data capture rules that they're not wanting to or able to do if they're going to operate in China. So China doesn't have a lot of those products. that we have, but they have their own. So a couple of companies that made the list are Cork, which is Alibaba's AI assistant on both web and mobile. Dalbao, which is ByteDance's AI assistant,

Starting point is 00:07:35 also on both web and mobile. And then Kimi, which is another general AI assistant from Moonshot AI. Each of those ranks, actually, all of them in the top 20 on web. Wow. And the majority usage in China, which I think reflects the fact that China is the biggest country in the world by population.

Starting point is 00:07:53 So even if they're only used one place, they're getting a lot of usage. And they don't have as much competition from the American general chat assistants that can't be in the country. Yes, like the chatGBs of the world. The second category of Chinese companies we're seeing are startups that are developed in or around China, but are built for the rest of the world. And you can't actually even use them in China in many cases. So these are products like Deep Seek or the video models like Haileo and Kling or products like Sea Art for images. I would say the concentration of these is especially strong in image and video, which is the space that you know well.

Starting point is 00:08:29 Yeah, I think image and video, we've seen a lot of great video models from China, particularly when it comes to animating from a single frame from an image. Bight Dance has also been doing a lot more around things like C-Dance, which is a really great video model they release that actually outscores V-O-3 on some of the arenas. One of the really interesting things that I know we can't disentangle in this data, But I think a lot of Chinese companies have taken the strategy in the U.S. of distributing their models through U.S. properties. So there's companies like Kria or Hedra that host various models and have subscriptions where you can access a bunch of the Chinese models at once, whether it's the closed ones like Kling or Minimax or some of the open source ones like Juan or Kwen, which a lot of people are using and really liking. Some of them will also have their own consumer-facing properties.

Starting point is 00:09:19 others will distribute through either the application layer or honestly through folks like fall and replicate more of the developer-facing platforms where you can do one-off runs or you can have an API to use them in your application. That is probably yet another way that Chinese companies are showing up in the list in a way, as you said, that's not measurable right now.

Starting point is 00:09:39 But the last trend that we were seeing with Chinese companies was products that are developed in China and used both in China and abroad. So Manus is a great example. They just announced a 90 million. annualized run rate. And if you look at their traffic, it's number one, Brazil, number two, U.S.

Starting point is 00:09:55 Brazil surprises me. Yes, a lot of AI traffic comes from Brazil. More free traffic than paid traffic. I was going to say, yes. But a lot of traffic. So we're seeing both kind of like this domestic AI ecosystem in China start to mature. I think for the very first time on this version of the list. Right.

Starting point is 00:10:11 And then we're seeing the same thing we've seen on other versions of the list, which is Chinese companies exporting their AI products abroad. And then to talk about another big trend, which you touched on earlier, vibe coding, we're probably all seeing the tweets from various vibe coding companies that are like, we went zero to 100 million or even more in ARR in a really short period of time. They have millions of users, kind of faster growth than I think we've seen in many other categories in a very long time. I'm curious, how did you see that kind of reflected on the list and how did that change since the last edition? Yeah, so six months ago it was just Bolt on the list. Now Bolt actually is on the

Starting point is 00:10:45 Brink List and Lovable and Replit both made it onto the main list. To me, I was particularly interested to look at not just traffic for these, but also revenue and retention. So Loveable recently announced $100 million in ARR. But it's always easy to say, especially for consumer properties, like, yeah, a lot of people are maybe signing up for a trial, but they're canceling and they're not going to stay on. Retention is low. We actually also, for the vibe coding products, looked at revenue retention across another data provider, Consumer Edge. So that's that looks at a cohort of everyone who signs up in month zero, how much are they paying and what percent are still paying in month one,

Starting point is 00:11:23 month two, month three. And we put some of this in the report, but what we found for many of the leading vibe coding platforms is they actually see 100% or above revenue retention in the first three months and then maybe flatten out a bit below 100%. Which, as a point of comparison, is very strong for what we see. I mean, it's very rare to see any sort of, especially consumer or prosumer.

Starting point is 00:11:45 might suggest that there's some enterprise usage happening there with prototyping and stuff within companies. Enterprise usage or even just solo vibe coders, people building projects who do get a low-cost plan to try it out and then find themselves actually publishing and using something and buying more credits and upgrading to the next plan, which is exciting. It's interesting though on that point, for both lovable and replet,

Starting point is 00:12:08 we can independently see traffic to the sites where you vibe code things. So that's where, like, you or I would. They're hosted on, they're hosted on like lovable. Yeah. So you can see traffic for everything people are making with lovable and replet. And then separately, traffic to lovable and replet, which are the people making things. And in both cases, the people making things traffic is much higher than the traffic to the things that they are making. Yes.

Starting point is 00:12:34 Which suggests one of two things. One, it could be that people who are making serious high traffic websites are buying domains for them. A custom domain. So they no longer pop up under. the lovable or the replic domain in this data. So their traffic would not get included. Yeah. Or it could be the case that people are building almost personal software,

Starting point is 00:12:54 software for themselves with these vibe coding platforms. Yeah. So they might publish them and not get a lot of hits, but they're extremely valuable to the individual user or maybe the user's family and friends. And I'm curious, have we seen anything yet in vibe coding coming to mobile? Like, are there not yet? Interesting. There's a couple companies, startups that we've seen,

Starting point is 00:13:13 but none of them ranked high enough to get a spot on. on this list this time. Yeah, we'll be super interesting to see the next edition of the list. Like, if any of those start popping up in the top 50. It's hard to displace the companionship and the AI girlfriend ones for sure. Yes. But maybe a vibe coding one can do it. Yes.

Starting point is 00:13:28 No, it's actually a good point because we did on the point of displacement for the first time we ranked what I'm calling our AI All-Stars. So this is across five lists. What are the companies that have made the list every single time? Amazing. Which is hard to do because this dates back two years now. So there's 14 of these companies. So we have ChatGAPT, Not a Surprise, Perplexity, and Poe, all made the list in what I call kind of general LLM assistance.

Starting point is 00:13:56 Right. Then we have Character AI and Companionship. Yeah. They've made it on both web and mobile. We've got Mid Journey, Photo Room, Leonardo Cutout Pro, VED, and 11 Labs. In creative tools. We have QuilBot and Gamma in productivity, and then we have Hugging Face and Civide. in model hosting.

Starting point is 00:14:16 And so those have made the web list for every single one? Web list for every single. Got it. All five of the versions we've done of this now. Amazing. It was funny looking back at the very first list because I think we had this question of, is it only going to be companies that invest tens of millions of dollars into proprietary models that are able to hold consumer attention?

Starting point is 00:14:37 Yeah. But now when we look at these 11 All-Stars, more than half of them are actually hosting or using other people's models or are our money. model aggregators. Right. And so I think that speaks to the fact that in consumer AI, the UI and the product experience matters just as much as the model, especially when so many amazing models are now API available or open source.

Starting point is 00:14:59 If you think of some of those properties too, some of them have built really deep and interesting workflows around creating content, even if they don't have their own model. Some of them are also starting to see what I would say are sort of the first kind of non-data network effects in AI, especially things like that. like Hugging Face and Civit AI, where, you know, you have these communities where people are hosting tons of models or Loras or datasets. They're commenting on them. They're ranking them. They're spitting up many apps that you can only access on that website. So it's pretty cool to see both of those kind of make the list over and over again and show that you can maybe have network effects

Starting point is 00:15:35 and AI. Yeah. I think you could argue to 11 labs is the same where people can publish their voices on 11 for other people to use. The voice libraries, I hear that all the time from people. that one of the reasons they love using 11 is there's thousands and thousands of voices you can choose from, and that's because so many folks have uploaded voices to the voice library. You could even argue the same is true for a chaty BT or mid-journey, where the more user data they get, the better models they can train, which then makes the product better and attracts more users, and it's a whole virtuous cycle. Yeah, totally.

Starting point is 00:16:05 I think that is the natural assumed network effect for AI, which is kind of more users, more data, more feedback, better models. But I know a lot of folks are wondering, like, where are the network effects beyond that, which is why I was particularly interested in, like, the hugging faces, civet AIs of the world, things like the 11 Voice Library. Yeah. We're even starting to see in some cases, Gamma is a good example of this on the list. 11 is another good example. Same with Photo Room.

Starting point is 00:16:30 These consumer AI properties are almost graduating to enterprise usage with things like team plans, templating, you know, design libraries. And then it becomes something that can spread organically through a team and that a whole organization can benefit from. And the more you invests into building out, say, your templated slide deck on gamma, the harder it is to kind of turn and move over to another platform. Yeah, I think that's one thing that a lot of people didn't expect

Starting point is 00:16:55 with a lot of these, especially creative tools or productivity tools, that I try to tell founders all the time is like there's so many AI enthusiasts now. Some are tourists, but some have real use cases. And often with companies like 11, we will see one individual signs up, They try it out. They see if they like it or not. And then that individual actually becomes like their own self-serve enterprise sale. Like they bring it into their company.

Starting point is 00:17:21 They make the case for it. And then it's so easy for. And then they go to the business and they're like, hey, we actually have 10 or 15 or 20 users on individual plans. Like we should have some sort of enterprise level contract here, which makes it a lot easier for these AI companies to grow than the traditional top-down sales that enterprise software had to do where you had to go in and get approval from 10 different people and then convince the employees to use the product versus this bottoms up adoption that we're seeing with a lot of these freemium AI products that start in consumer feels very cool and unique.

Starting point is 00:17:55 Yeah. And that in turn supports more consumer growth because then someone on a team will adopt it because their other team member had it and then they'll bring it home and use it for a project and spread to their friends and their kids. And yeah, I expect we'll continue to see more pro-sumer enterprise representation on this consumer AI list. So this, as you've mentioned, is the fifth edition of the list. I'm curious, reflecting back on all of the past editions, what are your biggest takeaways? And do you have any hot takes or predictions for what we're going to see in the next few lists? Yeah, I would say looking at the list now and then looking back, I really can appreciate now that

Starting point is 00:18:31 the first list or two was total chaos in the sense of half the list was new every time, if not more. And the traffic was fluctuating so wildly. Yes. And there's often, you know, like a two-week to one-month delay between when the data happens and when we get it through the data sources. And so founders would be contacting us angry, like, hey, I'm actually ahead of this other property now. I should be number two instead of number five just because the data sources had a little bit

Starting point is 00:18:59 of a lag and things were so volatile back then. Things were changing so rapidly. I would say that, as you said, companionship and general LLM assistance. like ChatGBT, BT, and then Creative Tools were kind of the three categories that were working two years ago. And anything else that popped up on the list in many cases was pretty random

Starting point is 00:19:18 and would spike one month and be gone the next month. I would say we've had a lot of stabilization since then. By the third edition of the list, we started seeing things that weren't just image and text. We started seeing video, we started seeing music,

Starting point is 00:19:32 which was really exciting. The fourth and fifth editions of the list, we still have some break-up. but we're also starting to see the list kind of normalize. Right, you said 11 new on the web for this time versus 17 last time. Yes, exactly. So even list over list. And there's fewer newcomers.

Starting point is 00:19:51 There's a clear list of all-stars. And the newcomers that we are seeing are kind of clustered around many of the same themes, like vibe coding and companionship on this edition of the list. I'm kind of bought into this all-stars concept now. Like we should maybe make jerseys for it or something. No, and I'm very... I hope that they are proud of themselves. Yes.

Starting point is 00:20:12 I hope that they're rooting for themselves. We should send them like trophies or something. We should. We absolutely should. I would say when I'm looking for the next five lists, there's a couple things that I have top of mind. Yeah. Our partner, Anish, wrote an article about how AI products are kind of verticalizing,

Starting point is 00:20:28 even within these general products. Like you'll go use Gemini for one thing and Claude for one thing and Chatsypte for another thing. Perplexity for another thing. I would expect that to continue. We're not seeing that this is necessarily a race that Chat ChbT is running away with, especially on mobile. People have lots of different use cases.

Starting point is 00:20:45 GROC, we didn't talk about GROC yet, but they had a big debut on both the web and the mobile list this time around, which was super exciting. And they popped up near the end of the period. Exactly. In terms of when GROC for the companions and the image and video,

Starting point is 00:20:59 I imagine, is what drove a lot of the growth in the GROC app. Exactly, yeah. And GROC debuted actually in the top at number four on the web list, which is pretty surprising. That's incredible. We also saw meta-a-I start to make a little bit of a dent this time around, not on the mobile list, but on the web list as well. They have a web.

Starting point is 00:21:19 I should look into this. Yeah, exactly. So we're still seeing, I think, things heat up, even in this space where you might guess that chat Chubit is kind of run away with it. For sure. I would say the other thing I'm expecting to see in the next two lists in particular. On the other end of the spectrum from creative tools where hallucin are the feature.

Starting point is 00:21:37 There's like productivity prosumer tools where hallucinations are a real problem. Right. So these are things that can make spreadsheets, slide decks for you, build financial models, answer emails. We're finally seeing both model reliability and kind of workflow and UI get to a point

Starting point is 00:21:54 where these products are exploding in revenue, and I think they're going to explode in usage as well. For sure. So I'm excited to see more in the prosumer product category on the next version of the list. Manus made it this time, time. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:22:07 Perplexity common as its own domain, I would expect might make it Jen Spark is another one that I might expect to see on future versions of the list. I think one really interesting thing that people sometimes don't realize about more of these professional-ish use cases, you know, financial modeling like you mentioned or coming up with the presentation or, you know, doing a formal pitch or doc or whatever is all of the evolution that we're seeing on the foundation model side, like, you know, GROC 4, the new version of Claude, GPD5, of like those aren't just sort of in their bubble on the side and then the app layer is separate.

Starting point is 00:22:39 A lot of these applications are powered by all of those models. So as those models get better at things like math and logic and reasoning, they have less issues with hallucinations, like that naturally supercharges all of these products that are in the kind of productivity, prosumer accuracy is important space. Exactly. And I imagine we'll reach a point where it tips them over

Starting point is 00:23:02 from like, oh, this was cool, but it was inaccurate too much of the time, so I can't really use it to like, oh, this is now good enough that like it can do a lot of stuff for me and I am willing to use it. Yeah, I think that's a great example. Even things like GBT5 release being very good at consumer health questions. Yes.

Starting point is 00:23:19 We might expect to see a wave of new and more reliable consumer health products on web or mobile on the next version of the list. Yeah, I was thinking about what categories we didn't see a lot of that we might expect to see in the future. More ed tech, I think. For sure, because ed tech is another one where it's important to not have a ton of hallucinations. Personal finance is one where we haven't seen a lot on either web or mobile that I expect to see a bunch more on mobile since it's such a big category there.

Starting point is 00:23:42 Social? Yep. I think there's been a lot of people wondering when are we going to see the first big AI-native social platform, which some could argue is now Facebook, which has largely been taken over by Boomer AI images. But I personally think there's going to be at least one, probably multiple separate ones. And honestly, GROC is sort of kind of making a case there and being a social platform. I think health, health is a great example, a great category,

Starting point is 00:24:06 or some of these more structured coaching, therapy, wellness types of things that I think a lot of people use chat GPT for today, but probably deserve to exist in separate products that will hopefully make the list in the future. Yeah, I agree. My biggest takeaway, actually, from every version of the list is that, as with everything else in consumer, there's so much randomness.

Starting point is 00:24:25 And if we were able to perfectly predict the next great consumer product, there'd be hundreds of people out there building it. So just like vibe coding nine months ago, it was a completely unexpected category to pop up on the list. I'm sure there will be one or two more in the next few editions, which is really exciting to think about. Amazing. So we got to stay tuned for the sixth edition, it sounds like. Exactly. Click through to check out the full version of the list, which is out now.

Starting point is 00:24:48 We'd also love to hear in the comments what your favorite product or company is that made the list this time. Or if you have any products you use all the time that you were shocked to find did not make the list, we'd particularly love to hear about those. And we'll see you in six months for the next one. Thanks for listening to the A16Z podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, let us know by leaving a review at rate thispodcast.com slash A16Z. We've got more great conversations coming your way. See you next time.

Starting point is 00:25:19 As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only. Should not be taken as legal business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain. investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see A16Z.com forward slash disclosures.

The a16z Show - The Top 100 Most Used AI Apps in 2025

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