Top 100 Global AI Applications List: ChatGPT Leads the Way, China's AI Power Rises Strongly

Leading global venture capital firm a16z has released the fifth edition of its Global Top 100 Generative AI ConsumerApp List", the list is based on two-and-a-half years of tracking monthly access data as well as monthly active user (MAU) data, revealing evolving trends in everyday AI usage behavior.

The main highlights are as follows:

1. Chinese players performed outstandingly: 11 products such as DeepSeek and Quark appeared on the web-based Top 50 list, accounting for 22%; 22 products such as Doubao and Baidu AI Search appeared on the mobile-based Top 50 list, accounting for 44%;

2, the much-anticipated DeepSeek ranked third on the web side and eighth on the mobile side, but the traffic slipped, with the mobile side dropping 22% from the peak, and the web side dropping more than 40%;

3, Meitu company AI application small outbreak, Meitu, BeautyCam and other five products are squeezed into the mobile TOP 50;.

4. Global Competitive Landscape: ChatGPT stays cliff first, Gemini second, Grok fastest growing, Meta AI web side only 46th;

5, Vibe Coding (ambient programming) has a rising trend, Lovable and other related products with high retention, ushering in a surge in traffic.

6. Only 14 products have been ranked in the Top 100 for five consecutive counts, including one product from a Chinese team - AI visual editing platform Cutout.Pro.

7, but the pattern of head AI products has become more stable, with 11 new products on the list, down from 17 in March.

▲Top 50 generative AI web-side apps, boxed products developed by Chinese companies (source: a16z)

Looking at the overall list, in the web-based list, theDeepSeek ranked #3, second only to ChatGPT and Gemini, with a total of11Apps confirmed to be developed by Chinese companies made the list, withQuark, Beanbag, Kimi and Qwen among the top 20(math.) genusConch, Kerinand other apps are also within the list.

Of the Top 50 apps on mobile, 22 were identified as products of Chinese companies, with Meitu's apps alone accounting for 5 seats (Meitu, BeautyPlus, BeautyCam, Wink, Airbrush).

The third-place AI Gallery, a Huawei product, is a platform that integrates AI applications and models, from which developers can access pre-trained AI models and datasets, and users can quickly apply the models on the platform directly to Huawei's cloud services or various types of devices, as well as share and communicate with community members.

▲Top 50 generative AI mobile apps, boxed products developed by Chinese companies (source: a16z)

The "Edge List", i.e., the 10 companies that failed to make the main list but are close to the ranking range, has five each of web and mobile. Lovable, which was on the web-side Edge List in the last issue, managed to jump to No. 22 on the main list at this count, and two companies, PolyBuzz and Pixverse, also managed to make it into the core rankings. a16z believes that this leap is a good example of the rapid growth of AI app generation tools.

▲51st-55th place marginal list (source: a16z)

Note: List rankings are based on Similarweb's monthly unique visitors and Sensor Tower's monthly active users. Products that are not AI-native but add significant generative AI functionality, such as Canva and Notion, are not included in the list.

I. Chinese Players Shine, Local Products and Overseas Applications Blossomed

In the web-based list, there are 11 products identified as being developed by Chinese companies, with5 modelsrise (in society)Top 20, specifically including:

Among them, Quark's domestic users accounted for96.22%.Percentage of domestic users of beanbags93.52%Kimi has it too.78.22%of traffic comes from within the country.

The web-based list also includes a number of products developed in China but aimed primarily at overseas markets, where the technical strength of the video generation model is particularly prominent, some of which even have access restrictions within China, including: Hailuo, Kling, SeaArt (image generation), Cutout.Pro (image editing), Manus, and Monica (image editing).Productivity tools), etc.

Among the mobile Top 50 apps, 22 were identified as products of Chinese companies. Meitu's apps took the exclusive 5 seats (Meitu, BeautyPlus, BeautyCam, Wink, Airbrush), and ByteDance's Doubao, Gauth (edtech), and the overseas version of WakeMap Hypic (image editing) also made the list.

China is the world's largest Internet user country, but mainstream international AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude are subject to access restrictions in the country, and AI service providers that want to operate in China need to apply for a license to meet data localization, content review and compliance requirements.

Second, DeepSeek growth slows, Grok rises strongly

DeepSeek's growth on mobile has slowed significantly, with the number of active users per month higher than at its peak.Down 22%.. On the web side, DeepSeek's decline is even more pronounced, down from its peak in February 2025Over 40%.

xAI's Grok Ranked on the Web Side4thMobile Ranking23rd placeThe growth of the product has been particularly significant on mobile. The product's growth on mobile has been particularly significant, going from a "cold start" with no standalone apps at the end of 2024 to its current status ofOver 20 millionMonthly active users.

Grok experienced a significant increase in mobile usage in July 2025, with the release of a new version of Grok 4 on July 9, the month's rise was nearly40%. Subsequent to the launch of the AI Companion avatar feature on July 14, the anime figure Ani was particularly popular.

As of now, Meta's AI assistant growth has been relatively flat. Its general-purpose assistant, Meta AI, ranked on the web side46th, failed to make the mobile top 50 list.Meta AI launched at the end of May 2025, but grew much slower than Grok, especially after a June 2025 incident in which users discovered that some of their posts appeared in the public stream.

Third, Google's strong entry, four products debut on the list

Google this time a total of four products on the network side of the list, this is the first time a16z was able to Google's traffic of different products for independent statistics and separately included in the rankings.

Google's general-purpose large-language modeling assistant, Gemini, came in at No. 2, behind ChatGPT, with about 121 TP4T of ChatGPT's web visits.

What other Google products made the list?

AI Studio, which debuted in the top 10, offers a sandbox environment for developers and supports application development based on Gemini models, including multimodal models.

NotebookLM followed in 13th place, which was originally launched as part of Google Labs and now operates a standalone site. notebookLM quickly gained popularity nearly a year ago and has continued to grow steadily since then, with only a small dip over the summer, which a16z speculates may be related to a temporary loss of academic users.

Google Labs, Google's consumer-facing AI experiment aggregation platform, tops the list39th placeLabs offers the Flow experience area for users to try out the video model Veo 3, as well as a variety of other apps including Doppl (virtual fitting of clothing), Portraits (AI coaching) and Project Mariner (intelligent agent browser).

After the release of Veo 3 in May 2025, Google Labs traffic skyrocketed over 13% in a single month, the largest increase in the past year.

On mobile, Gemini also ranked #2, but the gap with ChatGPT narrowed significantly, with nearly half of ChatGPT's MAUs.Gemini was particularly strong on Android devices, with nearly 90% of its MAUs coming from the Android platform, compared to ChatGPT's 60% share of Android users.

IV. Vibe Coding products achieve user growth

When a16z released its last list in March 2025, Vibe Coding was just emerging, and at that time only one company, Bolt, was on the web side of the list. Today, Bolt has made it to the fringe list, falling just narrowly short, while Lovable and Replit both made it to the main list for the first time.

While Vibe Coding's usage behavior appears to be short-lived, early data suggests high user retention, or at least that enough users are staying and scaling up their usage over time.

Data from credit card panel provider Consumer Edge shows that the user base of a headline Vibe Coding platform in the U.S. continues to have a revenue retention rate in the months after signupsOver 100%. This means that even after accounting for churned users, the group's overall monthly spending is still growing.

These platforms also drive the use of other AI products, with traffic to websites built and published through Replit and Lovable that do not use a separate domain counting towards replit.app and lovable.app, respectively. and, both have more significant traffic on their own, with lovable.app's traffic, which would have been in the top 50, lower than its development platform's main site traffic.

Products related to the Vibe Coding technology stack also saw a surge in traffic, as developers adopt these tools to deploy projects. However, because they are not AI-native, they do not have access to this list, as typified by database service provider Supabase. supabase's traffic growth has been highly synchronized with the rise of its core Vibe Coding platform, with growth rates accelerating markedly in the past nine months compared to previous years.

a16z believes there is still room for significant growth and new product opportunities in the Vibe Coding space.

Five, 14 products continue to be on the list, selected "all-star lineup", there is a Chinese company!

From the first to the fifth installment, there are 14 products that have never been absent, which a16z calls "an all-star lineup".

These companies truly reflect the diverse scenarios in which consumers use AI: general purpose assistants (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Poe); virtual companions (Character AI); image generation (Midjourney, Leonardo); and image editing (Veed, Cutout);speech production(Eleven Labs); productivity tools (Photoroom, Gamma, Quillbot) and model hosting (Civitai, HuggingFace).

In the inaugural list two years ago, a16z speculated whether all the head AI consumer companies would develop their own base models. Now the answer is revealed: of the 14 all-star companies, the5Having a self-research model.7using open APIs or open source models from other companies.2for model aggregation platforms.

It's interesting to note that despite the list's increasing globalization, the 14 companies that continue to be on the list come from just five countries: the U.S., the U.K. (Eleven Labs, Veed), Australia (Leonardo), China (Cutout.Pro) and France (Photoroom, HuggingFace).

Developed by Hong Kong, China-based Winroad Holdings and launched in 2018, Cutout.Pro is an AI-based visual content platform that offers a variety of tools such as background removal for images and videos, image enhancement, AI art generation, and more for e-commerce, designers, and developers.

Excluding the inaugural list, five other companies also meet the criteria for continued presence on the list due to recent growth: Claude and DeepAI are general purpose assistants, JanitorAI focuses on virtual companionship, Pixelcut is an image editing tool, and Suno specializes in music generation.

a16z concludes that the most notable finding of this edition of the list is that the AI ecosystem has begun to gradually stabilize: 11 new products have been added to the web-side list due to traffic growth, down from 17 new entries in the March 2025 list.

▲Newcomer to generative AI web-side applications (source: a16z)

The number of new entries on mobile is significantly higher, with 14, which a16z speculates is due to the app store's crackdown on "ChatGPT torrents," thus making room for more original mobile apps to develop.

▲Top 50 newcomers to generative AI mobile apps (source: a16z)

Note: Google has 4 new products on the list this time due to its further splitting of business domains, allowing a16z to track its AI product performance separately for the first time. These 4 products would have been on the list long ago if they could have been counted separately previously. The actual total number of new products is therefore 15.

Conclusion: Chinese companies have a clear advantage in AI global competition

From the perspective of this list, Chinese enterprises have occupied a position that cannot be ignored in the AI global competition track. China's large Internet user base and unique market environment provide a special development soil for local AI enterprises, which limits the entry of international products to a certain extent, but also forces Chinese enterprises to continuously explore and optimize in model optimization and scene landing.

The layout of domestic + overseas not only gives China more say in the global AI ecosystem, but also makes the local market an important testing ground for global AI innovation, because products that can validate their success in the complex and diverse user needs at home often have the potential to be replicated in other markets.

Source : a16z Originally published at https://a16z.com/100-gen-ai-apps-5/