Chinese AI platform DeepSeek surpassed ChatGPT in new web traffic in February, becoming the world’s third most used AI tool, according to analytics site AITools.
It recorded 525 million new visits in February as against ChatGPT’s 500 million.
This also made it the fastest growing AI model, outpacing others such as Canva and Elon Musk’s Grok.
However, DeepSeek still trails ChatGPT in overall monthly traffic.
OpenAI’s chatbot leads with more than five billion monthly visits, accounting for 43.16% of the global market share.
Canva ranks second with nearly one billion visits, and DeepSeek follows with some 800 million, or 6.58% of the market.
Deepseek logo is seen in this illustration taken Jan. 27, 2025. Photo by Reuters
Data from Chinese analytics firm QuestMobile earlier this year showed DeepSeek overtook ChatGPT in daily active users by late January and reached over 30 million users by early February, making it the fastest AI platform to hit that milestone.
In February DeepSeek also ranked among the top five in active monthly users, according to AI tracker AIcpb. It recorded 33.7 million active users to trail Nova AI with 56.6 million and Gemini and Doubao with 78.61 million.
ChatGPT ranked first with more than 349 million monthly users.
China accounts for the largest share of DeepSeek’s traffic at 30.71%, followed by India (13.59%), Indonesia (6.94%), and the U.S. (4.34%).
Founded in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, co-founder of AI-focused investment fund High Flyer, DeepSeek began development in April last year and launched its open-source R1 reasoning model on Jan. 20.
The model aims to compete with OpenAI’s Q* (Q-Star) in logical inference.
It has faced controversy over the alleged $1 billion development cost, the use of existing AI models to train its own system, and concerns surrounding data privacy and security.