Most Popular AI Companies, 2015 to 2026: The Race Month by Month

Data pulled: 24 October 2026 (UTC), covering July 2015 to September 2026. October is left out because the month is not over.

By Frankie C. · Senior Market Researcher, Mindber. Tracks 500+ AI/SaaS tools across SEA markets via the Mindber Innovation Index methodology.

How we assessed this: We pulled monthly English Wikipedia page views for 15 AI companies and their flagship model pages from the Wikimedia Pageviews API. Worldwide search interest for each brand's main product came from Google Trends. Both pulls ran on 24 October 2026. This is attention data, not hands-on product testing, and every monthly number is in the CSV files linked under the chart.

OpenAI is the most popular AI company of the past eleven years, and it isn't close. Its pages drew 74% of all English Wikipedia views across the 15 brands we tracked from July 2015 to September 2026. It has ranked first every month since October 2022.

Press play to watch eleven years go by, then read on for what drove each lead change.

Monthly views of each company's English Wikipedia pages and its flagship models, counted for human readers only.

Sep 2026OpenAI ships GPT-6 Astra

0

1M

2M

Sep 2026OpenAI ships GPT-6 AstraSep 2026Sep2026

OpenAIGPT-6

2,452,8392.5M

GoogleGemini 3.5

204,280204K

AnthropicClaude Fable 5.1

546,919547K

MetaMuse Spark

34,28534K

xAIGrok 4.7

118,897119K

DeepSeekDeepSeek-V4

99,515100K

MicrosoftCopilot

50,41650K

Mistral AIVibe

37,98538K

PerplexityPerplexity Computer

73,15373K

MidjourneyV7

16,48216K

Stability AISD 3.5

25,96826K

AlibabaQwen3.8

42,29042K

Moonshot AIKimi K3

57,19357K

Character.AICharacter.AI app

c.ai24,21324K

IBMwatsonx

9,1989.2K

Total since Jul 2015Total since Jul 2015OpenAI173MGoogle14MAnthropic8.9MDeepSeek5.9M

Replay

0.1×0.3×0.5×1×2×4×

MonthEmbed

Wikipedia page viewsGoogle searches

Sep 2026: OpenAI leads with 2,452,839

Sep 2026 · Wikipedia page views

#	Brand	Model on the bar	Views	Total since Jul 2015
1	OpenAI	GPT-6	2,452,839	172,943,796
2	Anthropic	Claude Fable 5.1	546,919	8,927,449
3	Google	Gemini 3.5	204,280	14,050,262
4	xAI	Grok 4.7	118,897	4,862,261
5	DeepSeek	DeepSeek-V4	99,515	5,913,701
6	Perplexity	Perplexity Computer	73,153	4,691,653
7	Moonshot AI	Kimi K3	57,193	690,491
8	Microsoft	Copilot	50,416	3,390,192
9	Alibaba	Qwen3.8	42,290	525,310
10	Mistral AI	Vibe	37,985	959,363
11	Meta	Muse Spark	34,285	2,172,741
12	Stability AI	SD 3.5	25,968	3,272,241
13	Character.AI	Character.AI app	24,213	3,790,554
14	Midjourney	V7	16,482	3,530,195
15	IBM	watsonx	9,198	3,789,851

Source: Wikimedia Pageviews API · Monthly data (CSV) · Make your own chart race

Each bar shows a company with the model or product it was best known for that month, so OpenAI's bar reads GPT-2 in 2019 and GPT-6 in September 2026. The panel under the bars keeps a running total since the first month. Switch the data source under the chart to see the Google view, which starts in November 2022, and open the table to read any month as plain numbers.

Before ChatGPT, IBM Watson and DeepMind took turns

The race opens with only three real contenders. IBM's Watson pages led for 17 months between 2015 and 2017, a long tail of interest from the computer that won Jeopardy in 2011. Google DeepMind led for 39 months, almost all of them between 2016 and early 2020.

March 2016 is the one month that broke the pattern. DeepMind's AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol four games to one in Seoul, and Google's pages drew 507,462 views. That is still Google's best month on this chart. Gemini, Bard and every model launch since 2023 have come nowhere near it.

OpenAI spent those years as the smaller lab. It took first place for single months in 2018 and 2019. Then came May 2020 and the GPT-3 paper, and from there OpenAI lost the lead only once. The numbers were tiny by later standards: OpenAI won that month with 75,227 views against Google's 64,795.

The month Midjourney came first

Since May 2020 only one brand other than OpenAI has led, for one month, by 941 views. In September 2022 Midjourney drew 129,886 views to OpenAI's 128,945. It was a photo finish. The image generator had opened to the public in July, and a picture made with it had just won an art prize at the Colorado State Fair. Stable Diffusion, released with open weights in August, was close behind them.

That summer belongs to image models, and it didn't last. Stability AI and Midjourney stayed in the top three into early 2023, and then their curves fell away. Both now sit in the bottom four of the Wikipedia ranking. Midjourney still sells one of the better-known image generators, and our Midjourney page tracks the product itself.

ChatGPT's lead, and why its Wikipedia line is falling

ChatGPT launched on 30 November 2022. December brought 3.16 million views to OpenAI's pages, more than every other brand on the chart had drawn in any month before it. April 2023 set the record that still stands: 9.30 million views in one month. Nobody, OpenAI included, has come close since.

The Altman episode shows up clearly. OpenAI's board fired its chief executive in November 2023 and took him back within a week. Views rose from 2.54 million in October to 3.40 million that month.

By September 2026, OpenAI's Wikipedia views had fallen to 26% of their April 2023 peak. Search tells a different story. ChatGPT's Google interest peaked in October 2025, and in September 2026 it still sat at 83% of that peak.

Our reading is that people haven't lost interest in ChatGPT. They no longer need an encyclopedia to explain it, and many search for it only to open it. A Wikipedia lead says a brand is new and talked about. A search lead comes closer to how many people use it. For the product itself, our ChatGPT page covers its plans and features.

Second place has changed hands ten times

Only four brands have ever ranked first. Second place is where the story moves, and since ChatGPT arrived each new runner-up has had a reason.

Character.AI took it in May 2023, the month its phone app came out, with 570,652 views. The chatbot for talking to made-up characters stayed second through August.

DeepSeek came closer to the top than anyone since ChatGPT launched. In January 2025 it released R1, a free reasoning model of the kind OpenAI had introduced with o1 four months earlier, along with its own app. DeepSeek's pages drew 2.72 million views that month, 78% of OpenAI's total. By March the surge had mostly faded, and our DeepSeek page follows where the lab went next.

xAI took second in March 2025 with 518,395 views, the month it merged with X. Perplexity took it in August 2025, when it offered $34.5 billion for Google's Chrome browser. Both were news spikes, and neither brand held the spot for more than two months in a row.

Anthropic is the exception. Since January 2026 it has been second every single month.

Anthropic's 2026: from news story to steady number two

Claude launched in March 2023 on the same day as GPT-4, and for a year Anthropic sat in the middle of the pack. Claude 3 put it in the top three for the first time in March 2024. It first ranked second in June 2025, and this year the spot became its own.

February 2026 was Anthropic's biggest month: 1,042,883 views. Three stories landed within four weeks. Anthropic ran two Super Bowl ads promising Claude would stay free of advertising, and it released Claude Opus 4.6. Then it refused a Pentagon demand to drop its limits on surveillance and autonomous weapons, and President Trump ordered federal agencies to stop using its models.

June added another spike. Claude Fable 5 launched on 9 June and went offline three days later under a US government order, a sequence our Fable 5 suspension report covered as it happened. Fable 5.1 followed on 1 September.

The gap to the leader is still wide. OpenAI drew 4.5 times Anthropic's views in September 2026. For a product-level comparison, our Claude vs ChatGPT guide sets the two assistants side by side.

Read about vs searched for: where the two measures split

Google is the clearest split. Its pages took 5.1% of Wikipedia attention this year, fourth behind xAI in some months, while Gemini took 23.3% of search interest, a solid second. Google's search line jumped fivefold from August to September 2025, the month its Nano Banana image editor went viral, and it hasn't dropped below 25 since. Our Gemini page covers the paid tiers behind those searches.

Anthropic runs the other way, with about twice the share on Wikipedia that it has on Google. We read that as a brand people hear about in the news before they use it. Microsoft is the only brand besides Google with a larger search share than reading share, which fits a product that arrives inside Windows and Office rather than through headlines.

These shares are each brand's slice of the 15-brand total in each source, so they compare the shape of attention, not its size. A 1% share of Google search interest and a 1% share of Wikipedia views are different amounts of people.

The Chinese labs: one spike and two slow climbs

DeepSeek's year after its spike shows how fast attention moves. Its 2026 views run 85% below the same months of 2025, and it sat fifth in September. That doesn't track the company's work, which kept going with V3.1, V3.2 and a V4 preview in April 2026. Its earlier R1 and V3 releases came out as open-weight models, which anyone can download and run.

Moonshot AI and Alibaba are climbing more quietly. Kimi K3, released on 16 July 2026, gave Moonshot 172,229 views that month and fourth place. Alibaba's Qwen pages had their best month on record in September 2026, the last month in the data.

All three are undercounted here, and it matters. Wikipedia and Google search are both blocked in mainland China, so both sources miss most of these companies' home audience. Read the Chinese labs' bars as their profile outside China.

The data behind the chart

This table is the race in plain numbers: yearly English Wikipedia views per brand, in thousands. The full monthly series is in the Wikipedia CSV, and the Google index is in the Google Trends CSV.

*2015 starts in July, when Wikimedia's pageview records begin. 2026 runs to September.

A brand here is a company plus its flagship assistant and model pages, counted with every redirect into them. Redirects matter more than they sound. "Bard (chatbot)" now redirects to Google Gemini, "Bing Chat" to Microsoft Copilot and "Claude (language model)" to Claude (AI), so old names keep their history. We count human readers only, which is the API's "user" agent filter.

Parent companies' own pages stay out. "Google", "Microsoft", "Meta Platforms" and "Alibaba Group" are about far more than AI, and counting them would bury the AI signal under searches for Gmail or Facebook.

Three fixes changed the numbers before publishing. Our first pull credited OpenAI with about 490 million views, nearly three times the real figure. The script cached each page title as a file, and Windows treats "Chatgpt" and "ChatGPT" as the same file name, so redirect spellings re-counted the main page. Hashing the titles brought OpenAI down to 173 million.

We also dropped a page called "Le Chat", which turned out to be a Belgian comic strip rather than Mistral's chatbot. Four person pages merged into brand pages went too, among them Perplexity's chief executive, since they measure interest in a person.

Google Trends needed its own repairs. Its ChatGPT topic only starts counting in June 2023, months after launch. Earlier months use searches for "chatgpt" and "chat gpt" instead, scaled up by the 15% more queries the topic catches once both run. Grok, Meta AI and DeepSeek got the same treatment for their first months.

Trends also compares at most five items at once and rounds to whole numbers. We fetched each brand alone for detail, then chained overlapping five-topic comparisons to set the levels. Google's notes on how Trends data is adjusted explain why the result is relative. Each point is a share of all searches at that time and place, scaled from 0 to 100.

What this race can't tell you

Attention isn't usage. Neither source counts users. A spike can come from a fight with a government as easily as from a launch, and Anthropic's February 2026 peak had both. Revenue, retention and model quality sit outside this data entirely. Our Model Arena ranks models on benchmark results instead.

English Wikipedia leans toward English readers, though they live everywhere. A brand covered mostly in Japanese, Korean or Chinese news will look smaller here than it is. Wikipedia pages also appear late: Perplexity's page only shows views from January 2024, more than a year after its search engine launched, and DeepSeek's from November 2024.

Search interest in the Google view is a share of all Google searches, scaled so the busiest brand-month equals 100. It can say Gemini drew about 40% of ChatGPT's search interest in September 2026. It can't say how many searches that was. You can check any brand's raw curve yourself with the free Pageviews tool or Google Trends.

Frequently asked questions

More from Mindber

If this race leaves you choosing between the two leaders' paid plans, our Claude Pro vs ChatGPT Plus breakdown compares what each $20 buys. The AI chatbot directory covers the products behind most of these bars. For the money behind xAI, read our report on SpaceX's IPO and its AI lab.

Logos in the chart come from the open-source Lobe Icons set and belong to their companies.