DeepSeek continues to be the fastest growing AI tool globally, months after the release of its R1 reasoning model triggered a stock market rout. The web chatbot interface of the Chinese AI startup received 524.7 million new visits from users in February 2025, surpassing US rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT which recorded around 500 million website hits over the same period, according to data provided by an AI analytics platform called aitools.xyz. The total number of visits to DeepSeek’s AI chatbot website was 792.6 million, out of which 136.5 million were unique users. “Unique visits represent cumulative monthly counts, meaning returning users in different months are counted again. The total unique visits for all tools combined do not represent distinct individuals due to user overlap across multiple AI tools,” the aitools.xyz website read. It also revealed that DeepSeek’s market share has increased from 2.34 per cent to 6.58 per cent in February. However, DeepSeek was still ranked at No 3 on the tracking site’s global list of AI market distribution, with ChatGPT claiming the top spot and Canva in second place. In the chatbot category, ChatGPT was ranked No 1 followed by DeepSeek at No 2 with a chatbot market share of 12.12 per cent. Aitools.xyz defines chatbot market share as “percentage of all Chatbots category visits that went to this specific tool.” The analytics platform also mentioned that China led the adoption of AI tools last month with 221.6 million visits due to a +193.2 million month-over-month (MoM) growth. Indian users accounted for 43.36 million visits to DeepSeek’s AI chatbot website, the fourth highest in terms of country-wise web traffic. The AI industry saw 12.05 billion total visits last month, and 3.06 billion unique visitors engaged with AI tools, the report stated. According to its website, aitools.xyz tracks more than 10,500 AI tools across 171 categories every month to offer real-time updates on AI adoption trends. “We analyse total visits, unique visits, user demographics, and more across the categories to provide insights into the AI industry’s size, trends, and top performers,” it said. Earlier this week, DeepSeek released a major upgrade to its V3 large language model with improvements in areas such as reasoning and coding capabilities. The hedge-fund backed AI startup published benchmark tests on Hugging Face showing enhanced performance across multiple technical metrics, according to a report by Reuters.
