Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has emerged as the fastest-growing AI tool globally, surpassing OpenAI’s ChatGPT in new monthly website visits. According to data from the AI analytics platform Aitools.XYZ, DeepSeek recorded 524.7 million new visits in February 2025, exceeding ChatGPT’s 500 million during the same period.
Total website visits of DeepSeek's AI chatbot hit 792.6 million, while the number of unique users hit 136.5 million. While it continues to grow fast, DeepSeek is still in third position among global AI tool rankings after ChatGPT and Canva. Its market share, though, jumped from 2.34% to 6.58% during February, highlighting its global acceptance.
India ranked fourth in the top traffic sources globally to DeepSeek, providing 43.36 million visits per month. China topped the adoption of AI tools with 221.6 million visits, a huge month-to-month hike of 193.2 million. The AI industry reported 12.05 billion visits during the last month with 3.06 billion different visitors interacting with AI tools.
Aitools. XYZ, a tracker of more than 10,500 AI tools in 171 categories, shows that DeepSeek has a 12.12% chatbot market share. Thus, placing second to ChatGPT in the category. Market share for the platform refers to the ratio of total visits made to all tools related to chats.
DeepSeek's success is due to its cheaper but efficient AI models and recent developments. Earlier this week, the firm released a major update to its V3 large language model, enhancing reasoning and coding skills. Benchmarking tests on Hugging Face showed improved performance on several technical measures.
Although its quick rise has also raised concerns regarding future misuse. Intelligence reports reveal that attackers are abusing AI capabilities through intelligent jailbreak methods. Thus, creating cybersecurity issues.
With greater global use and ongoing improvements, DeepSeek is turning out to be key player in the AI chatbot space. It remains to be seen if DeepSeek will be able to sustain this upward trajectory and take on ChatGPT’s OpenAI in the long term.