Nearly three years after ChatGPT’s release, it seems like there’s new AI products everywhere you look.
But consumers have recently begun to latch onto some clear favorites. That was the biggest takeaway from Andreessen Horowitz’s list of the top 100 GenAI consumer apps, in which the venture firm ranked AI-native products with traffic data from Similarweb and Sensor Tower.
Among web products, this fifth edition of the list contained fewer newcomers than the same ranking assembled six months ago (11 versus 17). And in certain popular categories, like AI assistants and creative tools, the top handful of apps are starting to grow entrenched, Andreessen Horowitz partner and list author Olivia Moore told us.
“We are at the phase of seeing what I might call some early winners—or at least early leaders—in a couple of the categories where the models have been ready from day one,” Moore said. “And so that would be the general LLM assistants, like the ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity group. And then also the creative tools—Midjourney, ElevenLabs, Photoroom.”
ChatGPT and Gemini topped both the web and mobile apps lists, followed by DeepSeek, Grok, and Character.ai on the web, and art app AI Gallery, ByteDance AI app Doubao, and Microsoft Edge on mobile. The venture firm also highlighted 14 apps that have appeared on all five of these lists that it has published, including ChatGPT, ElevenLabs, Hugging Face, QuillBot, Poe, and Character.ai.
How they “keep the crown”: Those stalwarts tend to have one of two things going for them, Moore said: They’re either from a big-name lab, with the recognition and “aura” that goes along with that, or they’re startups that have come to own a specific use case, like (a16z-backed) ElevenLabs with voice generation.
“A lot of people thought…‘OpenAI is going to develop its own text-to-speech models and crush [ElevenLabs].’ And what we’ve seen is that OpenAI and Google don’t have time to make the best models for everything,” Moore said. “And so a lot of companies are able to get traction when they focus more specifically.”
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“Then also, we are starting to see some moats. With Eleven, there’s a little bit of a brand moat in that they’re kind of the name in text-to-speech. And so every other product that pops up gets compared to them, which helps them continue to keep the crown. And then some data network effects—as you have more users, you can train the model to be better, which then gives you more users.”
Here are some other trends Moore noticed in assembling the lists:
Google it: Google’s consumer AI products have come into their own with Gemini, Google AI Studio, NotebookLM, and Google Labs all cracking the top 50 web products. But Moore said the search giant is still figuring out how to best market its AI apps to consumers.
“For such a historically great consumer company, they still seem to be struggling with exactly how to package each of the products in a way that normal people find them usable,” she said. “There’d be more of them, and they’d be ranked even higher, if they can figure out the UI.”
Chinese winners: Blocks on American AI apps in China, as well as Chinese teams moving abroad, have helped boost a number of Chinese apps into the rankings, including ByteDance’s Doubao, Alibaba’s Quark, and Moonshot AI’s Kimi, according to Moore.
Vibe coding and productivity ascendent: Vibe coding apps like Replit and Lovable have grown in popularity this year, while AI-powered personal productivity—answering emails, generating slide decks—has also attracted more consumers, according to Moore.
“We’re finally starting to see AI productivity emerge,” Moore said. “We’re still early, but I would expect to see even more of those names on the list next time, and we’ll definitely be investing there.”