60m visits in a month: the consumer AI agent race
In the last couple of months, a wave of consumer AI agents arrived. These are AI assistants that can book a restaurant, call a plumber, or do your shopping for you, rather than just answering questions. At battleVS.ai we build games that people play with and against their own agents, and we are currently building on top of four of these platforms: Muse, Instinct, Hark and Fo.
Because our product depends on how these platforms grow, we keep a close eye on them. There isn’t much public data yet, so we looked at web traffic estimates for each of the four for September and October. It’s a not perfect, but it tells us something about how big each platform is, where its users are and how they find it.
A clear order
Combined, the four went from around 19m website visits in September to 60m in October. There is already a clear order: Meta’s Muse is, perhaps unsurprisingly, far ahead with more than 45m visits in October, followed by Instinct with around 11m, Hark with 1.7m and Fo with around 750k.
All four grew very fast from September, which is partly because most of them had only just launched. Instinct went public in late August, Muse launched on 8 September and Fo opened to the public at the end of September. Even so, the jumps are large. Muse more than tripled its web traffic, Instinct more than doubled, Fo grew almost 6x and Hark grew around 30x, with its jump coinciding with the launch of Hark Pro in early October after months as a waitlist. November will tell us a lot more about whether this is launch interest or something more durable.
The Meta factor
Muse obviously benefits from cross-promotion across Meta’s other properties, and Meta has used Facebook and Instagram to push it, so its lead is not a surprise.
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Muse is only live in four countries: the US and Canada, and Japan and Singapore since late October. The other three are open much more widely. In other words, Muse reached 45m visits in October almost entirely from two countries, which again says something about both Meta’s formidable reach and the size of the opportunity once it expands.
The quality of the visits
Raw visit numbers only tell part of the story, so we also looked at what people do once they arrive. A single visit lasts five to six minutes on average, which is quite long for a website, and visitors click through 4–5 pages of the site. That seems to suggest people are taking a serious look: signing up, connecting accounts and trying things out.
Instinct holds on to visitors best. Only about 30% of its visitors leave after seeing one page, against 40–50% for the others.
Where the visitors are
For all four, most visitors are from the US (between 40% and 60%), and India is in the top three for each of them.
Beyond that, the maps start to diverge. Muse draws visitors from India, Vietnam and Pakistan, even though it isn’t live in any of them yet. Hark has the widest spread, with China and Brazil in its top five, while Instinct has some traction in Israel and Spain. Fo is the most concentrated, with the US, India and Canada making up more than 90% of its visitors.
How people find them
Most visitors come directly, which is typical for ‘hot’ products people have heard about elsewhere, whether through press coverage, social media or friends.
After that, the four take quite different routes. Instinct gets more than a quarter of its visitors from Google and other search engines, around double the others. Hark gets as much traffic from social media as it does from search.
A bigger difference is in paid advertising. Instinct and Hark get almost none of their visits from ads. Muse gets around 11%, and Fo around 25%, making it the only one of the four where paid campaigns are a big part of the mix.
AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity send some traffic to these agents too, but only 1% or less for each.
It’s however important to remember that these are website visits only. These agents can typically also be used through apps or messaging, and in Instinct’s case mostly by text and phone, so this is a partial view of a very new industry. The figures are also third-party estimates, and the country and traffic source numbers cover desktop visits only. They’re good for comparing the four platforms against each other, but less reliable as exact counts.
Even so, it gives a first sense of the pecking order and size of these new platforms.
