A new report released by the publicly traded market research and intelligence firm SimilarWeb—covering global web traffic patterns for AI-related platforms for 12 weeks through May 9, 2025—offers a helpful look for enterprises and interested users into the current landscape of generative AI usage online.
Using proprietary analytics based on site visits, the report tracks trends across sectors including general-purpose AI tools, coding assistants, content generators, and more.
It also maps the downstream disruption of traditional sectors like education, search, and digital freelancing.
Why this report matters to enterprise technical decision-makers
For enterprise AI leaders—particularly those responsible for model deployment, orchestration, or data integration—this report is more than just a consumer trend snapshot. It’s a map of user familiarity and expectation.
Tools like ChatGPT, Claude, DeepSeek, and Grok are what employees are already using at home or experimenting with informally at work. If your internal AI apps or copilots don’t match the baseline experience offered by these tools, you risk user rejection and poor adoption.
Moreover, selecting the same models with high external traction for your internal orchestration pipelines or RAG deployments can cut onboarding time and training costs, since your team will already know the interface and behavior.
In short, aligning your enterprise stack with the tools dominating usage charts may be the fastest path to trust, usability, and value delivery.
Here are five key findings from the report:
Developer-focused AI tools are surging in adoption, with traffic to the category up 75% over the past 12 weeks.
That growth includes Lovable, which exploded with a jaw-dropping +17,600% spike, and Cursor, which grew steadily month over month.
As AI becomes more deeply embedded in IDEs and continuous integration workflows, usage patterns suggest these tools are no longer just experimental—they’re now seen as essential infrastructure for modern software teams.
It also helps explain why OpenAI reportedly tried to buy Cursor and has also reportedly finalized a deal to purchase rival AI coding platform Windsurf — as the usage of these tools explodes, OpenAI wants to get a larger cut of the action and revenue, especially since its models are often used as the engine behind-the-scenes for these very users.
2. We all know DeepSeek had a moment earlier this year — but so did Grok — and now both have fallen back into low plateaus
Two of the fastest-growing AI platforms of the year, Grok and DeepSeek, show just how quickly hype can turn into burnout.
Grok traffic skyrocketed more than 1,000,000% in March—driven by its branding as an uncensored yet powerfully intelligent platform and Elon Musk association—before falling more than 5,200% by early May.
DeepSeek saw a similar arc, peaking at +17,701% growth before crashing -41%. The takeaway: virality can’t replace retention, especially compared to AI leader OpenAI and also legacy tech brand Google.
Once among the most accessible use cases for generative AI, writing and content tools are seeing user fatigue.
Category traffic fell 11% overall, with platforms like Wordtune (-35%), Jasper (-19%), and Rytr (-23%) all trending downward.
Only Originality.ai bucked the trend with steady traffic gains, likely due to its focus on AI detection rather than generation. This plateau suggests content saturation and possibly growing skepticism over quality or usefulness.
Separately from the SimilarWeb report, I think that because chatbots already use a default text input/output field as their main user interface, even for multimodal interactions, the fact is that most users who would be interested in this capability will go to model providers like OpenAI’s website for ChatGPT (and mobile apps), or Google’s Gemini, or even Anthropic’s Claude, directly, rather than seek out a separate AI writing tool.
Design-focused AI remains a mixed bag. While overall category usage dipped slightly (-6% over the 12-week window), some platforms made outsized gains.
Getimg posted a massive +1,532% surge, while Artbreeder jumped +100%.
Others, like Stable Diffusion and Looka, saw double-digit declines. The erratic pattern may reflect a crowded landscape of tools that offer similar functionality but compete on novelty or aesthetics.
5. AI is eating up legacy tech such as crowdsourcing and search
Traditional digital services are showing slow but steady declines across the board—likely the result of AI substitution.
Freelance platforms such as Fiverr (-17%) and Upwork (-19%) are losing traffic, possibly as users turn to AI tools for tasks like design, writing, and code.
Search engines such as Yahoo (-12%) and Bing (-14%) continue a multi-quarter drop in visits, while consumer EdTech companies like Chegg (-62%) and CourseHero (-68%) are in free fall.
The signs point to early-stage AI disruption beginning to erode the utility of some legacy platforms. It also offers a hint to enterprises that either leverage or create such services — the time may be coming to reduce dependency on them, either from a revenue generation, marketing, or overall business perspective.
The post SimilarWeb’s new AI usage report reveals 5 surprising findings, including explosive growth in coding tools appeared first on Venture Beat.
