July Global AI App Insights: Chat Assistants Dominate, Social Companionship Surges

In the first half of 2026, the global AI application market maintained high-speed expansion. The supply of AI products continued to grow, accompanied by a simultaneous rise in user scale and demand. Data shows that the monthly active users (MAU) of global AI applications have surpassed 2.03 billion, indicating that the market remains in a phase of rapid penetration.

Entering July, however, market growth experienced a brief cool-down, with overall MAU figures showing a phase-specific decline. At the same time, the performance of various sub-tracks and leading products varied, signaling that the market is gradually transitioning from "all-around growth" to more pronounced structural shifts.

In this issue, we continue our in-depth analysis of the global AI application market. Leveraging July's comprehensive data, we deconstruct MAU fluctuations across tracks, growth trends of leading products, and the new evolutionary directions of the global AI competition in the second half of the year.

I. AI Chatbots Lead by a Massive Margin, Surpassing One Billion MAU

Reviewing the data from the first half of 2026, the global AI application market exhibited a clear trend of "head concentration and sub-track differentiation."

AI chatbots led by a massive margin with approximately 1.12 billion MAU, representing a year-on-year increase of 34.73%, and remain the core entry point for global AI users. Meanwhile, mature tracks such as AI video editing and AI image editing saw growth rates slow down or even decline.

However, amidst the overall slowdown, certain vertical sub-tracks experienced explosive growth. Among them, the AI productivity track took the lead with a high growth rate of 50.07%, while AI music creation also achieved a leap in incremental growth at 52.28%.

Looking at specific applications, the head effect in the July global AI application rankings remained prominent. In the download charts, ChatGPT, Gemini, and ByteDance's Doubao firmly secured positions in the first tier. Notably, ChatGPT exceeded 50 million monthly downloads, demonstrating overwhelming global user attraction. Meanwhile, Facebook View, Grok, and several vertical image and interactive chat applications carved out a niche through differentiated scenario entry points.

In terms of in-app purchase revenue, leading products exhibited astonishing monetization capabilities. ChatGPT generated over $200 million in monthly revenue, leading by a wide margin, closely followed by Claude AI and Grok. Additionally, music creation tools like Suno and several virtual character applications successfully broke into the top ten for revenue, confirming that content creation and emotional companionship tracks possess robust paid conversion potential.

II. Social Companion Track Demonstrates Strong Growth Momentum

According to the July global AI application MAU rankings, general chat assistants continue to dominate overall traffic. ChatGPT firmly maintains its absolute dominance with 1 billion MAU, Gemini ranks second with a 6.78% month-on-month increase, and leading products like DeepSeek and Meta AI have securely locked down positions in the top ten, highlighting a significant Matthew effect.

Beyond this landscape, the image-generation-focused AI Mirror and the social-companionship-focused Talkie successfully broke through, each recording over 30 million MAU and demonstrating strong product stickiness.

According to the July global AI application MAU growth rate rankings, the AI social companionship and virtual character tracks exhibited robust momentum, occupying over half of the list and acting as the core engine driving growth in the mid-to-tail market. Among them, the month-on-month growth rates for Dootchi and zeta reached 54.70% and 22.65%, respectively.

Concurrently, multimodal generation tools performed impressively, with AI chat assistants, image/video generation, and text-to-speech applications (such as AI Chat, vivago.ai, and ElevenLabs) holding steady at the top while maintaining double-digit growth.

Data Source: aicpb.com

According to the July overseas-bound Chinese AI application MAU rankings (referring to apps built by Chinese teams targeting global markets), visual creativity and social companionship tracks assumed core growth dominance. vivago.ai led the chart with an 18.03% month-on-month surge, while image and video generation tools like PixVerse and KLING AI also maintained top positions, intuitively reflecting the continuously rising demand for AIGC visual content creation among global users.

Meanwhile, AI social companionship and virtual character products represented by PolyBuzz, Talkie, and Saylo continued to dominate the charts, sustaining a robust scale through high-stickiness emotional interaction.

Data Source: aicpb.com

III. Popular AI Application Case Studies

AI Social Companionship — Dootchi

Dootchi is an AI social companionship application built by a domestic team specifically targeting global markets. Featuring core capabilities such as role-playing, high-emotional-density interaction, and contextual memory, the product surpassed 4 million cumulative global downloads within just three months of launch. It has performed exceptionally well in the Latin American and US markets and is frequently regarded as a premium, cost-effective alternative to similar hit products.

In terms of product design and commercialization, Dootchi focuses on lightweight interaction and a low-restriction free dialogue experience. It adopts an "ads plus subscription" monetization model, offering basic features for free supported by advertising, while providing tiered paid subscriptions to optimize the user experience—precisely satisfying global users' urgent demands for emotional resonance via AI.

Source: Dootchi

AI Voice Generation — ElevenLabs

ElevenLabs is an AI voice generation application tailored for content creators, influencers, and professionals. Since its launch on June 24, 2025, its global downloads have exceeded 10 million, with in-app purchase revenue surpassing $2 million (of which 35% originates from the US market).

In terms of core features, ElevenLabs supports over 70 languages, a diverse selection of AI voices, in-app creation and editing, and one-click exporting, while seamlessly integrating with mainstream platforms such as TikTok and Instagram. Powered by advanced voice models and web-synchronization capabilities, it significantly enhances voiceover and content production efficiency for creators, making it immensely popular among both B2B and consumer (C-end) users

Source: ElevenLabs