The chatbot landscape is changing! Personalized Character.AI is quickly catching up to ChatGPT in the United States.

Artificial intelligence unicorn Character.ai is making its way into the App user field of ChatGPT.

According to a recent analysis by market research company Similarweb, Character.ai, invested by A16Z, currently has 4.2 million monthly active users on iOS and Android apps in the United States. In comparison, ChatGPT's app has nearly 6 million monthly active users.

Character.ai is an AI chatbot product that supports autonomous selection of characters for conversation. It was founded by former Google researchers Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, both of whom were involved in the development of Google's large-scale model LaMDA. The biggest difference from ChatGPT is that users can freely choose or design their favorite characters or individuals to chat with within Character.ai.

Since its launch, Character.ai has experienced rapid user growth. Within 48 hours of its release, Character.ai had over 700,000 installations on Android smartphones, surpassing top entertainment applications such as Netflix, Disney+, and Prime Video. In less than a week after its launch, Character.ai has attracted over 1.7 million installations.

According to data from mobile marketing company Appsflyer, the average retention rate for mobile apps after 30 days is 3%-4%, with an uninstall rate as high as 40% after 30 days. Based on the current data, Character.ai has retained the majority of its initial users and continues to attract new users.

However, ChatGPT still performs significantly better on the web, indicating that Character.ai's users may prefer to interact with AI chatbots on mobile devices. In addition, ChatGPT also outperforms Character.ai on Android mobile devices. According to reports, ChatGPT has 22.5 million monthly active users on Android, while Character.ai has 5.27 million.

Another trend is that Character.ai is more popular among younger demographics. Research shows that compared to a 60% acceptance rate for Character.ai, young people aged 18-24 have generally lower acceptance rates for other AI providers. For example, Perplexity.ai, Midjourney, Anthropic, and Google's Bard have acceptance rates of 22.7%, 22.3%, 25.3%, and 18.46% respectively among the 18-24 age group. According to data from Similarweb, ChatGPT's global website traffic has been declining for the third consecutive month in August, with a decrease of 3.2% to 1.43 billion visits. The traffic in the previous two months also decreased by 10%. Additionally, the average visit duration on the ChatGPT website decreased from 8.7 minutes in March to 7 minutes in August. However, the decrease in Character.ai's website traffic during the summer was offset by the users of the Character.ai mobile app.

Nevertheless, the downward trend of ChatGPT is now reversing. Similarweb found that with the arrival of the back-to-school season, ChatGPT's traffic in the United States is increasing. Compared to the previous month, ChatGPT's website traffic in August grew by 0.4%, the number of unique visitors in the United States increased by 3%, and the global number of unique visitors increased by 0.3%. However, the number of unique visitors in June and July decreased compared to the same period last year.

Character.ai still has great potential to expand its user base. In March of this year, Character.ai completed a $150 million financing round led by A16Z, bringing its valuation to $1 billion.