Three years into tracking consumer AI, the leaderboard is becoming familiar. This is the seventh edition of our Top 100 AI Consumer Apps, where we rank the top web and mobile AI products by monthly traffic. (You can read our previous ones – I, II, III, IV, V, VI – to see how these have evolved over time.) Just 11 products make their first-ever appearance in this edition – the smallest number of debuts across our seven lists so far.

But traffic data alone increasingly conceals the real trends in consumer AI. For the first time, we’re adding a ranking by observed spending on U.S. consumer cards, thanks to YipitData. This gives us another way to see the market, including dozens of vendors absent from our web and mobile lists – like desktop apps, and agents inside existing messaging platforms.

The biggest takeaway from this new data? Consumer AI usage is wide, but not very deep…for almost everyone. While nearly half of U.S. consumers now report using AI, only 25% are engaged with it daily. And as of August, just 4.5% of U.S. consumers had an active paid personal subscription to ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude. You can get more data on broad AI adoption in our State of Markets presentation we shared last week.

However, AI’s consumer power users are extremely engaged – and highly monetizable. The top 10% of spenders account for roughly half of all observed spending. These high spenders disproportionately buy coding, productivity, and creative tools.

In these users, consumer AI has found its first real market: people who pay – often a lot – for tools that help them build, create, and get work done. Reaching everyone else will likely take different products. We’re seeing glimmers of this now with the launch of personal assistants that, unlike their ancestor OpenClaw, are usable by non-developers – and free.

Alongside these product capability improvements, consumer AI likely needs a new business model – or possibly, an old one. Essentially all AI revenue has come from direct subscriptions or usage charges, unlike prior eras where consumers were monetized indirectly via ads or transactional revenue. This has likely been a limiting factor in deeper consumer adoption.

As in our previous editions, we rank the top 50 web products by monthly visits, using Similarweb, and the top 50 mobile apps by monthly active users, using Sensor Tower. Generative AI must be central to the product experience; both AI-native companies and established products can qualify.

We’re making one change to eligibility from this list forward: products primarily designed for NSFW use cases will be excluded. This should not be interpreted as a decrease in demand for these products – we’re treating them as a distinct category rather than ranking them alongside SFW products.

1. Three LLMs, three different games

Consumer AI’s headline is the same as our very first report in September 2023 – ChatGPT was the pioneer, and remains the leader. It has a roughly 2x lead on Gemini in August web visits and an even wider lead over Claude (6x). This gap is more significant on mobile, where ChatGPT has a 2.5x lead on Gemini and a 14x lead on Claude in monthly active users.

Our new revenue data tells a similar story. Per YipitData’s panel, ChatGPT has 3x more U.S. consumer paid subscribers than Claude or Gemini.

The most significant shift in this landscape has been Claude emerging as the clear #3. Claude did not even rank on our first web list in September 2023, but has now passed competitors like DeepSeek and Perplexity in traffic. Even more significantly, Claude passed Gemini on U.S. consumer subscribers earlier this year. Even after Google migrated legacy paid users over to the AI plan (inorganically inflating subscriber count), Gemini and Claude are neck and neck.

Claude’s run came on the back of new products (Cowork in January, Claude Design in April), new models (Fable 5 in June), and a burst of public attention. Amid Anthropic’s late-February dispute with the Pentagon, Claude hit #1 among free U.S. mobile apps for the first time.

Unlike OpenAI and Google, Anthropic has been clear that they will not run ads in Claude, and instead monetize users via subscription. They have been doing so aggressively. Claude has 7.3% of consumer payers on their most expensive individual plan, Max – which starts at $100/month. This compares to 1.3% for Google and 1.1% for ChatGPT on their corresponding $100/month subscriptions.

By mid-summer, the winds had shifted. YipitData’s global desktop panel recorded declines in Claude’s average daily sessions in July and August, while its U.S. e-receipt panel showed gross additions slowing and churn rising. ChatGPT, meanwhile, re-accelerated with the July launch of GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna and the debut of ChatGPT Work.

Increasingly, the question may be less “who is winning” – and more “how is each company executing on their own opportunity.” Per YipitData’s panel, only 8% of U.S. ChatGPT subscribers are also subscribed to Claude. ChatGPT has a more equal split of consumers across genders and incomes – and is also dominant in all U.S. states aside from California, Montana, and Massachusetts.

This difference in users is at least partially a result of the products being pointed in different directions. Between Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI, there were 127 new launches over the past six months. Anthropic has focused almost entirely on the prosumer (Claude Design, Code Review, Claude Science). Google has led on creative models (Lyria 3 Pro, Gemini Omni). OpenAI has tackled both consumer and enterprise – with tools for enterprise (ChatGPT Work, Sites, Dots) and for consumers (Images 2.0, Health, Personal Finance, job search).

2. AI spending follows a power law

For the first time, we’re adding a ranking based on observed consumer spending, using data from YipitData. The data is U.S.-only and drawn from panels rather than a census; so it should not be read as total company revenue. However – it gives us a new view of how consumers pay for AI, with a clear takeaway: heavy concentration.

The base of consumers paying for AI is growing, but still narrow. In August, 4.5% of eligible consumers in YipitData’s U.S. e-receipt panel had an active paid personal subscription to at least one of ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude, up from 2.1% a year ago.

Even among the relatively narrow band of paying consumer users, spending follows a power law. Only 13% of users who pay for one AI product pay for even one other AI tool. And, spend from the top 1% of payers accounted for 19.5% of all observed consumer AI spend. This is more than the bottom 50% of spenders combined (16.6%).

This top 1% pays an average of $903 per month on consumer cards for AI (work usage may be even higher), as of August 2026. And, they’re still growing this spend – up 80% in the last 18 months. The difference from the median AI payer is stark: they are spending $25 per month, and have barely expanded this spend over time.

Who are these power spenders? They look less like mainstream consumers and more like prosumers, individuals buying software to build, create, and get work done.

Across the panel, the top 1% of spenders disproportionately purchase tools for automation and product building, like n8n, fal, Manus, and Nous Research (Hermes Agent). These heavier spenders also over-index to creative tools like Higgsfield, Figma, and HeyGen.

As a result, there are significant differences between consumer traffic and consumer revenue, made tangible by our first spending ranks. 29 of the top 50 vendors by spend do not appear anywhere on our web or mobile traffic lists. For those who do appear, their ranking by traffic and ranking by spend can vary drastically depending on how aggressively they monetize power users.

Only seven companies make all three lists – and one (ChatGPT) ranks at the top of each. This includes three model companies (ChatGPT, Claude, and Suno), two AI-native applications (Perplexity, Photoroom), and two incumbents who have added AI (Canva, Notion).

We expect the paying base to broaden as business models open up. Personal agents, in particular, show potential to monetize on transactions rather than seats, offering something closer to unlimited usage without a subscription. More on that later in the report.

3. The race to become your personal assistant

In March, we wrote that agents like OpenClaw were not yet usable by most consumers – but would be. Six months later, multiple startup consumer or prosumer agent products now report hundreds of thousands of users, including Instinct, Tomo, Poke, Lindy, and Town. And, the incumbents have struck back with agents of their own – Meta’s Muse, OpenAI’s Dots, and xAI’s Grok Bot.

Most of these agents strive to be available everywhere – like a human assistant, you can text, email, or call. The channel du jour is iMessage, where viral agent Instinct launched in August 2026. Companies like DoorDash have since launched their own iMessage agent for text-to-order. More prosumer-oriented agents, or consumer agents focused on a specialized use case, often also have their own mobile or web app to provide a deeper experience.