How OpenAI Competitors Drive Traffic to Their Site

We are currently halfway through a year that has continued the disruption the tech industry has felt since 2020. While technologies such as blockchain, Web3, and augmented reality initially garnered significant hype, the AI boom still holds the most substance and potential. 

Browse through LinkedIn and X (formerly known as Twitter), and you’ll see diverse expert opinions. Some argue that we have opened Pandora’s Box, as OpenAI and its competitors hasten civilization towards a potential extinction-level event. Conversely, some believe we are making progress in finding solutions to humanity’s most intractable issues. 

From a business standpoint, venture capitalists, analysts, and executives hold a more optimistic view of the industry. Recent reports project that the generative AI market will reach a market size of 150 billion USD by 2032, with a 31% CAGR. 

Looking at the number of companies in the space (Thanks for the graphic, Kevin Mu.), these projections aren’t so surprising.  

Of course there’s no way to discuss this booming industry without mentioning the tool that opened the floodgates late last year: OpenAI’s  ChatGPT

OpenAI has a strong grip on the lucrative AI industry thanks in large part to its first-mover advantage in rolling out the leading text generation tool in late 2022. Earlier this year, ChatGPT set the record for fastest consumer product to reach 100 million users, accomplishing this in just two months. Of course, the revolutionary chatbot isn’t the whole story. OpenAI’s other offerings, like Dall-E and an API allowing companies to build their own AI tools using its GPT model, are also catalyzing its growth. 

Between these tools and the content it publishes, like research, documentation, and blog posts, OpenAI brings in nearly 2 billion each month in organic traffic. 

But don’t mistake OpenAI’s channel distribution as a choice to rest on the laurels of a superior brand and product. The company creates some highly valuable longform content, covering everything from prompt engineering tips to API documentation and product updates. 

The company’s blog post introducing ChatGPT, published in November 2022, now brings in over 66 million in organic traffic every month. 

Despite OpenAI’s head start and the viral popularity of its tools and API, there are some competitors looking to close the gap — over 250 of them, actually, if you ask CB Insights. And they’re here to take a slice of that ever-growing AI market. 

Today, I want to focus on some key companies competing directly with OpenAI as generative AI model developers. Specifically, we’ll take a look at the core offering and marketing channel distribution of the following AI companies: 

• Adept
• AI21 Labs
• Anthropic
• Cohere
• Inflection

Every SaaS company out there is exploring an integration with tools like ChatGPT to assist with things like writing and programming. But it’s the companies listed above — the ones training their own large language models and AI-tools, led by some of the brightest minds in the space — that are positioned for long-term success. 

How OpenAI Competitors Approach a Highly-Competitive AI Market

The AI market is growing more crowded by the day. Some companies, like OpenAI or Jasper, have been around for just under a decade and have had time to build up a marketing and sales engine alongside their cutting-edge products. Others, having popped on the scene in the last few years, are still in a lean phase, focusing all resources and labor on the tool itself. In other words: they let the product drive growth. 

This market is moving incredibly fast, and positioning will be a major factor in supporting the best products if these competitors hope to close the gap on OpenAI. With that in mind, let’s take a look at the core offering of these  competitors, the monthly traffic they bring in, and the channels they use to do so. 

Adept

A newcomer in the generative AI space, Adept focuses on the application of artificial general intelligence to facilitate interactions between people and software. Co-founded and led by ex-OpenAI engineer David Luan, the company has secured over $415M in funding despite being just a year-and-a-half old. 

Adept’s key differentiator and competitive edge is the targeted nature of its product: an AI model that functions as an overlay window on top of existing software.

Its AI tool, named ACT-1, can perform tasks like importing LinkedIn URLs into recruiting software or taking notes after a sales call on Salesforce, with the potential to drastically increase the efficiency of other software tools. This versatile capability has attracted strategic investors like Microsoft, Nvidia, Atlassian, and Workday. 

I expect a nascent company like Adept to have relatively low traffic, which is what we see with its May 2023 total sitting at about 224K visits. Here’s how that traffic share breaks down across its marketing engine: 

The Adept team is leaning on both direct and organic traffic to bring potential users to its site. The home page brings in the lion’s share of organic traffic, with the next two most-visited pages explaining Adept’s goal as a company and itscore offering, ACT-1.

As the ACT-1 post explains, this a model is based on the same Transformer technology developed by Google and used by tools like OpenAI. The difference is that Adept’s product is trained on various digital tools instead of just large volumes of text. The blog page includes video clips of ACT-1 helping a user complete tasks on Redfin, Salesforce, and Google Sheets more efficiently. 

As the company grows, it will be interesting to if Adept continues to create promotional material and supporting documentation for this target audience of enterprise software users.

AI21

AI21 Labs researches and develops LLMs in the hopes that they can fundamentally change the way we read and write for a time “when machines become thought partners.” Founded in 2017, the company recently took a big step in bringing that fundamental change to reality — partnering with Amazon so customers can scale AI21-based tools through the tech giant’s Bedrock services. 

AI21 is also at the frontier of a new approach — called in-context retrieval augmented language modeling (RALM) — which is realizing substantial language model performance gains in its LLMs and use-based tools.

Instead of relying on a single language model, AI21 Labs leverages multiple models, like their Jurassic-2, to create more robust AI systems. The company also develops tools, like its AI-powered writing assistant called Wordtune.

The AI21 website currently brings in around 218,000 total visits each month, with the Big 3 of direct, referral, and organic traffic accounting for over 90% of its traffic: 

One of the ways AI21 is spreading the word about its cutting-edge tools is through a tried-and-true content strategy: case studies. 

Its most popular blog post is currently a case study explaining how one of its customers, Tweet Hunter, used the AI21 Studio large language model to build a product that propelled the X tool to an 8-figure exit. In just over 1000 words, shows other SaaS companies how AI21 is the perfect growth partner for the age of AI. 

Pairing this type of strong content, with its established brand and the referral traffic it gets from from high-authority domains like ZDnet, Substack, Medium, and stanford.edu, AI21 is well positioned for growth in the coming years.

Anthropic

Generative AI startup Anthropic, another company co-founded by OpenAI veterans, has raised $1.5 billion in total funding since its founding in 2021. One of the key differentiating factors for this AI company, particularly in the eyes of investors, is its focus on safe, reliable AI services that positively impact consumers and businesses.

The company’s chatbot, Claude, uses Anthropic’s constitutional AI training method which is designed to align AI behavior and human intentions within a set of guiding principles.

Google, Salesforce, and Zoom are among the major tech companies and VCs showing strong belief in Anthropic’s technology.  Claude is applicable to a variety of conversational and text processing tasks, like constructing virtual assistants capable of answering emails, conducting research, and generating various forms of content. 

As a well-funded, well–established company (at least, in AI years), it’s no surprise that Anthropic is leading all OpenAI competitors in terms of organic traffic. As of May 2023, it’s bringing in over 2.7M total visits to its website, with the marketing channel distribution breaking down like so:

According to ahrefs, over 55% of Anthropic’s organic traffic comes from its Introducing Claude page, which explains how the generative AI tool was developed for commercial use with the help of partners like Quora, Notion, and DuckDuckGo.

Winning over enterprise stakeholders requires more than just a tool that’s popular among individual employees. By bringing in its key target audience during the product development stage, Anthropic has the potential to make major gains on OpenAI in a highly lucrative consumer segment. It’s more of a product strategy than a marketing one, but sharing that info definitely doesn’t hurt. 

Cohere

Like Anthropic, Toronto-based Cohere is emerging as another strong OpenAI competitor. The company just reached Unicorn status with its recent Series C — bringing its total funding to $430M. Founded by Google Alumni, it’s another AI company that’s focused more on winning the enterprise user than mainstream consumers and tech enthusiasts.

Cohere offers a range of use-based AI tools for text retrieval, generation, and classification, but it’s main business offering is an enterprise conversational AI that the company says will drive key processes

In addition to developing commercial AI tools, Cohere also has a nonprofit research lab named Cohere For AI. Led by Google alum Sara Hooker, the lab aims to contribute “fundamental research” to the open source community and solve some of the industry’s most significant challenges. 

Founded in 2019, Cohere is one of the more seasoned OpenAI competitors on this list. The company has built up a strong monthly traffic volume in that time, bringing in just over one million visitors to the site in May 2023. 

Cohere is one of the strongest OpenAI competitors when it comes to providing its target audience with content that educates and empowers readers. Whether they’re looking for an introduction to LLMs, transformer models, or prompt engineering, readers find that Cohere provides lots of top-of-funnel content to bring in new users and establish its expertise in the space. 

To further this point, Cohere even provides free access to its Large Language Model University — a series of pages in its “doc.cohere” subdomain that goes over everything one needs to know about this revolutionary technology. 

In terms of content marketing, it certainly looks like Cohere is leading the way among these OpenAI competitors. 

Inflection

Unlike many of the other companies on this list, Inflection AI’s initial focus is more on individual consumers — creating an AI that improve human-computer interaction. The company has raised over $225 million in funding since its 2022 launch and aims to eventually develop AI software products that aid human-computer actions at the enterprise level.

Inflection’s chatbot product, Pi, short for “personal intelligence,” is designed to engage in conversational dialog, remember past interactions, and understand its users over time. Pi is currently offered for free, designed for casual conversations and can remember up to 100 turns of conversation with logged-in users across multiple platforms. 

Bill Gates recently generated some hype around Inflection, stating that the company that wins the AI arms race will develop a personal-assistant-style tool. 

Inflection AI plans to expand Pi’s functionality to include real-time content updates, sharing links, sources and summaries, and eventually managing a user’s calendar, email, and other documents. The company also has a waitlist for businesses and developers looking to take advantage of its Conversational API. 

Despite its limited time on the market, Inflection has captured a lot of attention online, bringing in about 380K total visits in May. The company’s leading source of traffic is actually organic search at 44%, followed by direct at 37% and social at 12%. 

Inflection’s success with organic traffic is more surprising considering that it only has 15 pages under its domain. But, given the breadth of its home page, there really isn’t much more the scaling company needs. Everything an AI enthusiast and chatbot user needs is accessible right on the page:

• An explanation of Pi and how it acts as a personal assistant, creative partner, and more
• Prominent links to the desktop page and App store where interested visitors can start using the app immediately
• The mobile platforms where users can talk to Pi — iMessage, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger
• Examples of common use cases like venting, answering questions, getting advice, and assisting with life changes
• An FAQ section with dropdowns for the product, company, support services, and data and privacy policies

If Inflection can repeat this type of attention to detail across pages as it expands, it’s in great shape to take big steps in the AI space. 

Keeping Tabs on OpenAI Competitors in the AI Arms Race

After taking a snapshot of how these OpenAI competitors currently orient themselves in the market, I now plan to check back in down the road to see how traffic totals, channel usage, and messaging change over the next few quarters. 

AI users from across the individual – enterprise spectrum are very clearly past the awareness stage of their journey. Adept, Anthropic, Cohere, and these other model developers are currently working to capture interest, increase desire, and drive action the way OpenAI has done so successfully with its product and brand. 

Only time will tell which of these companies can obtain the level of brand recognition and product adoption that OpenAI is enjoying with ChatGPT, and which will deploy more creative strategies to reach end users. 

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