The AI Search Marketshare Race: OpenAI Accounts for 66.5% of 2.5M+ Monthly Citations to HackerNoon
OpenAI (66.5%) accounts for the majority of AI search calls to HackerNoon, based on my analysis of end-user–initiated requests from AI assistant and AI search to HackerNoon blogs from April 22 to May 22, 2025. AmazonBot (Anthropic) followed with 25.5%, and Perplexity trailed at 8%. The total volume of end user AI requests jumped to 2,563,800 in 30 days, which is 34% more requests for HackerNoon blogs than my April report on the AI search marketshare — underscoring a growing dependence on AI-driven discovery.
This analysis aggregates AI Assistant and AI Search queries to approximate end-user–initiated AI search traffic across HackerNoon URLs. Non-human traffic—such as web crawlers, bots, and automated scripts—has been filtered out to ensure the data reflects only human-initiated requests. The dataset includes instances where AI systems surfaced or cited HackerNoon content in response to human queries. Measured via the Cloudflare AI Audit tool, OpenAI accounted for 1,705,410 requests (+72% increase from 991,580), Amazon accounted for 652,550 requests (+12% increase from 581,990), and Perplexity accounted for 205,840 requests (-39.8% from 342,100). Perplexity’s sizable drop in HackerNoon citations—despite a 34% increase in overall AI citations—suggests a possible decline in their user activity, a shift in their citation behavior, or both—or possibly something else entirely (if you know, let me know).
How does this align with more widely reported data about these AI search providers? Perplexity reportedly has 15M (DemandSage) to 22M monthly active users (Business of Apps). Claude reportedly has 18.9M monthly users (Coolest Gadgets), but major blogs and news outlets have generally struggled to report reliable user data for Anthropic too. AmazonBot also includes a lot of API services beyond just Claude and Anthropic. At the TED conference in April, Sam Altman and Chris Anderson recently discussed whether OpenAI has a half billion users, as recently self reported, or a billion users, as Sam had mentioned backstage.
Meanwhile, Google remains the elephant in the room (pictured in the featured image above as a guerrilla—I know it doesn’t match the idiom—but they’re in the AI search room and do have the existing strength of a guerrilla). This data provides a valuable proxy of the emerging AI search market beyond Google. Do note why I say beyond Google: as Google’s slapped AI generated results atop most search results, they are ostensibly the leader in AI search market share, just as they are in traditional search. Google kicked off the year by dropping below 90% search engine market share for the first time since 2015 (SearchEngineLand) and (Statista) currently has them at 79%. But none of the search engine market share metrics cited have OpenAI listed at all, even though many of our community members are turning to ChatGPT instead of Google for many internet search queries.
With millions of monthly human initiated AI search events calling the HackerNoon Library, we have rare insight into how and how often models and products like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity are actually surfacing content. This month we saw a 34% increase in overall AI search requests for HackerNoon blogs, which I see as a good approximation for the total growth in AI search market from March through May. We’ll be updating these AI search traffic rankings periodically—so smash that subscribe button by my profile pic to see how the AI search marketshare evolves.
