😺 20 AI tools ruling the web

Welcome, humans.

Sam Altman released a new blog post today, and his “predictions” went viral on X:

Some are calling it a premature victory lap, others are saying it’s a big development, and others threw the blog into NotebookLM to create a podcast version.

IDK about you, but we can’t wait until there’s a video explainer version of NotebookLM. Give us the 2 min recap of all the major points, any cool graphics, and get in / get out. Anybody know a tool like that (that’s actually good)? Let us know!

Here’s what you need to know about AI today:

• We break down the most popular AI tools (based on web traffic).
• Cloudflare unveiled AI detection tools and marketplace plans.
• Robinhood CEO funded AI project to outperform humans in math.
• Scammers hacked OpenAI's X account to push fake crypto token.

Advertise in The Neuron here.

These are the most popular AI tools (according to the internet).

We saw an interesting poll last week from The Information:

It turns out, 77% of the 1K+ readers who responded now use AI tools (like Perplexity) instead of traditional Google searches—and 25% use AI more than Google.com.

This makes sense. The Information is a publication for tech industry insiders. But it got us thinking: how much traffic are AI companies getting?

Answer: quite a lot. Exploding Topics tracked down the 20 most popular AI tools in 2024 by total monthly website visits. This is what they found:

1. ChatGPT is still #1, with over 3B visits a month.
2. Graphic design platform Canva (841M visits), language translator DeepL (303M visits), Google Gemini (267M visits) and Character AI (220M searches) round out the top 5.
3. Surprisingly, Claude is 10th place (~89M visits) and Perplexity is 11th (82M visits).

Of all of these, Claude’s traffic seems to be growing the fastest (at 8,700% over last five years).

We were also surprised to learn about the massive traffic going to more niche AI services. Maybe you’ve heard of these, maybe you haven’t, but millions of people use them every month:

1. Remove.bg (99M+ visits)—removes the background of an image.
2. Quillbot (~95M visits)—a writing assistant platform with multiple tools.
3. Suno (71M visits)—a music generator + Spotify-style platform.
4. CapCut (50M visits)—Bytedance’s “all-in-one” video editing suite.
5. Quizizz (37M visits)—an interactive quiz-making resource for teachers.

As for Perplexity versus Google? This is a good analysis from earlier this year:

As of May, Google had 290x more users than Perplexity, with Google users performing about 13 times more searches per month than Perplexity users.

How’d we find this? A Perplexity search:

That said, the # of people who use Perplexity is a drop in the bucket compared to those who use ChatGPT (again, over 3B visits per month). Information retrieval is one of the key drivers of those visits.

Google still gets 131B visits per month, so even if every one of those 3B+ GPT visits was replacing a Google search, AI search engines have a long way to go to replace Google.

That said, another recent poll found 8% of those surveyed now use ChatGPT as their default search engine (up from 1% the month before). With SearchGPT set to eventually integrate into ChatGPT, we’ll definitely be watching this trend.

Which of these tools do you use the most for search, and how often?

Perplexity

ChatGPT

Claude

Gemini

You.com

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Around the Horn.

Full story here.

• Cloudflare announced new tools to let sites detect and block AI for free, and will launch a marketplace so sites can sell access to their content sometime in the next year.
• OpenAI introduced the “OpenAI Academy”, which will invest $1M in API credits and provide training and technical guidance to support developers and organizations in low- and middle-income countries.
• Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev just raised $75M to build an AI that’s better at math than humans are.
• Crypto scammers were able to hack into OpenAI’s press team’s X account and shill a fake OpenAI token (here’s a good recap on how they did it).

Treats To Try.

1. *Sana AI is your ultimate AI assistant for work—it helps analyze documents, summarize meetings, automate repetitive manual tasks, and more. Work faster AND smarter—try Sana AI for free today!
2. Reviewradar analyzes software reviews to help you quickly understand user preferences and expectations for SaaS products.
3. Storypitch helps you craft compelling pitches, stories, and brand content with expert human review
4. Virtuous helps you automate fundraising tasks for your nonprofit (raised $100M).
5. Momos helps you manage guest feedback and boost customer engagement for your multi-location restaurant (raised $10M)
6. Uizard turns text prompts or hand-drawn sketches into editable mockups and prototypes so you can quickly generate + iterate on UI designs for apps and websites.
7. BuyScout is a chrome extension that helps you shop online by answering your questions about products and tracking prices for items you want to buy.

See our top 51 AI Tools for Business here!

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Tuesday Ticker.

• A.D chose Collaborative workspaces: “Just imagining all of the lost insights and request on Slack or Teams that causes missed deadlines or requirement. That will be a thing of the past!”
• E.S. chose Instant presentation drafts: “The hardest part of putting together a presentation is getting that initial draft or format down. Having AI create it would be a massive help and speed up the whole process.”
• S.H. chose Custom AI agents: “General applications are nice, but creating a conversational and always available AI teammate to do all the tedious stuff is just great.”

A Cat's Commentary.