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The startup was DeepSeek. VentureBeat, citing Similarweb’s Global AI Tracker, reported that DeepSeek’s estimated web traffic increased 8,658% during the 12 weeks ending February 28, 2025, while OpenAI’s measured web properties increased 9%.
That was an extraordinary growth comparison—but it was a comparison of estimated website traffic, not company revenue, total users, API consumption, enterprise adoption, or overall market share.
The short answer
DeepSeek is the Chinese AI company behind the DeepSeek chatbot and the R1 and V3 model families. It was relatively unfamiliar to many Western consumers before its January 2025 breakout, which helps explain why early coverage described it as an “obscure” startup.
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The headline figures came from a VentureBeat report citing Similarweb:
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| Platform | Reported change | What it measured |
|---|---|---|
| DeepSeek | +8,658% | Estimated web-traffic growth |
| OpenAI properties | +9% | Estimated web-traffic growth |
| Measurement period | 12 weeks | Ending February 28, 2025 |
The correct interpretation is that DeepSeek experienced explosive web momentum from a comparatively small base, while OpenAI’s much larger measured web presence grew more slowly. The figures do not show that DeepSeek overtook OpenAI in users, revenue, technology, or total AI-market position.
Why 8,658% growth can happen
Percentage growth is highly sensitive to the starting point. For example, if a website rose from 100,000 visits to 8.758 million visits, the increase would be approximately 8,658%.
By contrast, a mature website growing from 1 billion visits to 1.09 billion visits would report 9% growth—even though it gained 90 million visits.
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Random freezes, missing sound and display glitches usually trace back to one bad driver. Find and replace yours safely.Free scan · under a minuteThose figures are only an illustration, not the underlying Similarweb traffic counts. The lesson is that percentage growth measures acceleration, while absolute visits measure scale. Without the starting traffic, ending traffic, and market share, the percentage alone cannot tell you which platform was larger or attracted more total visitors.
What drove DeepSeek’s surge?
DeepSeek-R1’s release and the publicity surrounding it in January 2025 created a powerful burst of attention. Developers, investors, technology users, and AI researchers discussed its reported reasoning performance, lower operating-cost claims, and implications for the competitive AI market.
That attention likely encouraged people to experiment across several product surfaces:
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- DeepSeek’s web chatbot
- Native mobile applications
- Its downloadable or open-weight models
- API access
- Third-party tools and integrations
However, traffic data cannot by itself establish why every visit occurred. The surge may have included sustained product use, benchmarking, curiosity, news-driven visits, developer testing, and automated activity. A viral launch can produce enormous short-term acquisition without producing comparable long-term retention.
That distinction matters for anyone assessing a technology company as an investment or business competitor. Traffic acquisition is an early signal. Repeat usage, paid conversion, API volume, and enterprise contracts are stronger evidence of durable demand.
What did OpenAI’s 9% growth mean?
The 9% figure applied to OpenAI’s measured web properties in the cited comparison. It did not mean that OpenAI’s entire business, customer base, or user count grew only 9%.
OpenAI distributes products through more than a public website. Depending on the dataset and reporting method, a web-traffic comparison may omit or incompletely capture:
- ChatGPT mobile-app activity
- API consumption
- Enterprise deployments
- Embedded assistants
- Third-party applications
- Products or domains outside the measured group
A mature platform can also grow substantially in absolute terms while showing a modest percentage increase. Calling 9% “stagnation” would therefore be misleading; 9% is positive growth, and the headline does not provide the absolute traffic totals needed for a direct scale comparison.
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What Similarweb measures—and what it does not
Similarweb is a digital-intelligence provider, not the first-party analytics system for DeepSeek or OpenAI. Its products estimate and compare digital behavior using traffic-intelligence data.
Similarweb’s AI-related products cover areas such as website visits, traffic trends, competitive domains, traffic sources, and referrals from generative-AI engines and chatbots. Its AI Traffic materials describe AI traffic as visits arriving through links or citations from AI engines and chatbots. Its documentation also explains how to use AI-chatbot traffic reporting and its browser extension:
The cited tracker data is therefore best described as estimated, domain-level web traffic. Similarweb’s tracker documentation explicitly warns that its growth rates do not capture API usage or integrations. That limitation is especially important for AI products, whose usage may take place inside software tools, mobile apps, coding environments, enterprise systems, or self-hosted deployments.
Estimates can differ from:
- Google Analytics reports
- Server logs
- App-store analytics
- First-party user counts
- API-provider billing records
- Financial filings
The exact 8,658% and 9% comparison should consequently be attributed as: “VentureBeat reported, citing Similarweb’s Global AI Tracker.” It should not be presented as an independently reproduced calculation from a publicly available first-party dataset.
Did DeepSeek overtake OpenAI?
No—not based on this statistic alone. The answer changes depending on what “overtake” means:
| Question | What the figures establish |
|---|---|
| Which had faster percentage growth? | DeepSeek, during the cited period. |
| Which had more absolute web visits? | Not established by the headline. |
| Which had greater global web share? | Requires a separate market-share comparison. |
| Which had more active users? | Not established. |
| Which generated more revenue? | Not established. |
| Which had greater API usage or enterprise adoption? | Not established. |
| Which produced the better model? | Traffic data cannot establish this. |
| Which retained users longer? | Not established. |
The defensible conclusion is narrower: DeepSeek won the early-period percentage-growth comparison and demonstrated that AI attention could move rapidly after a major model release. That is evidence of disruption and distribution momentum—not proof of a complete transfer of leadership.
Why later data matters
A single 12-week period can capture a launch, a news cycle, or a temporary experiment. Later tracker data from Similarweb showed negative 12-week changes for DeepSeek in multiple subsequent 2025 measurement periods, while OpenAI remained positive in the cited table. The later pattern does not erase DeepSeek’s breakout, but it shows why an early spike should not be treated as a permanent ranking.
For market analysis, the better question is not “Who had the biggest percentage?” It is “What happened after the attention arrived?”
Why website traffic is an incomplete AI-market proxy
AI usage increasingly occurs through channels that may not appear as visits to a public chatbot domain:
- Native mobile applications
- APIs
- Software-development tools
- Search engines
- Enterprise software
- Hardware devices
- Messaging platforms
- Embedded assistants
- Open-source model downloads and self-hosting
A model can gain substantial usage without a matching rise in public website traffic. The reverse is also possible: a website can receive a large wave of curiosity visits without creating regular users or paying customers.
Referral traffic provides another useful warning. In a study of 3,000 sites, Ahrefs reported that 63% received some AI-referred traffic, but AI referrals represented only 0.17% of average website traffic. That finding concerns websites receiving referrals from AI services, not chatbot usage itself, but it illustrates the broader point: one traffic channel is not the same as total product adoption.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How to test whether the momentum was durable
Investors, founders, marketers, and AI researchers should look for several months of evidence across multiple product surfaces:
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Outbyte Driver Updater FREEScan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteDriver Scan →Outbyte PC Repair FREERepair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsFix Now →- Monthly active users: Are users still active after the news cycle?
- Returning-user rate: Do visitors come back, rather than visit once?
- Sessions and task completion: Are users completing meaningful tasks?
- App retention: Do mobile downloads convert into recurring activity?
- API token volume: Is developer usage increasing outside the public website?
- Paid conversion and revenue: Is attention becoming monetization?
- Enterprise contracts: Are organizations adopting the product in durable workflows?
- Developer adoption: Are integrations, deployments, and community projects growing?
- Model downloads and active deployments: Are downloadable models being used rather than merely tested?
- Geographic distribution: Is growth concentrated in one market or broad?
- Traffic quality: What share comes from returning humans, referrals, bots, or automated testing?
- Capacity and reliability: Do outages, rate limits, or access restrictions explain changes in traffic?
Retention and monetization are generally more informative indicators of product-market fit than an unusually high percentage-growth figure. A company that attracts attention but cannot retain users, serve demand, or convert usage into revenue may not have durable competitive momentum.
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What the result means for business and investment analysis
DeepSeek’s breakout was commercially important even if it did not prove that OpenAI had been surpassed. It demonstrated that model releases can quickly redirect consumer attention, developer experimentation, media coverage, and investor expectations.
For an investor, the figure is best treated as an early leading indicator requiring confirmation—not as a valuation metric. It may signal rising awareness or distribution, but it does not answer whether the company has sustainable revenue, defensible technology, favorable unit economics, regulatory durability, or reliable infrastructure.
For a marketer or SEO professional, the data also reinforces the need to define the surface being measured. Website visits, AI-search visibility, chatbot referrals, app activity, and API consumption are different metrics. Competitive-intelligence platforms can help compare some of those layers, but none should be treated as a definitive source for total AI-company users or revenue.
Similarweb offers broader market and traffic intelligence through products such as AI Traffic and its AI Search Intelligence offering. Its AI-search product is sales-led rather than presented as a single public standard price. Other tools measure different layers: Semrush combines SEO and AI-search visibility, while Ahrefs emphasizes search, backlinks, site auditing, and related AI-referral analysis. Their data is useful for specific workflows, but it is not a replacement for first-party product analytics.
The bottom line
DeepSeek really did post an extraordinary 8,658% increase in estimated web traffic during the 12 weeks ending February 28, 2025, according to the Similarweb data reported by VentureBeat. OpenAI’s measured web properties grew 9% in the same comparison.
But the statistic measured web momentum, not total company growth. It did not prove that DeepSeek had more users, revenue, API activity, enterprise adoption, or market share than OpenAI. The most accurate reading is that DeepSeek’s viral breakout exposed how quickly AI attention can be redistributed—and that durable leadership must be demonstrated through retention, usage across product surfaces, and monetization over time.
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