Anthropic might’ve lost out on the Department of War contract and been banned from federal agencies, but it could be making up with the sudden popularity of its app among consumers.
Data from SimilarWeb shows that claude.ai has surpassed both grok.com and deepseek.com in daily website visits for the first time in 2026, with the surge tracking almost precisely to the period when Anthropic’s confrontation with the US government became public. The numbers tell a striking story about what a week of front-page political controversy can do for a consumer brand.
The Numbers
For most of January and into early February, claude.ai was running a distant third among the three platforms. While Grok and DeepSeek were each pulling between 9 million and 11 million daily visits, Claude was sitting considerably lower — in the 4 to 7 million range on most days. The gap was consistent and significant, suggesting that despite Claude’s strong reputation in developer and enterprise circles, it had not yet broken through to mainstream consumer audiences in the way its rivals had.
That changed sharply in the second half of February. Claude’s daily visit numbers began climbing steeply around mid-February and accelerated further toward the end of the month, coinciding directly with the explosion of media coverage around Anthropic’s standoff with the Department of War. By the final days of February, claude.ai was recording approximately 14 million daily visits — pulling clearly ahead of both Grok and DeepSeek, which remained in the 10 to 11 million range.
The Timing Is Hard To Ignore
Dario Amodei published his detailed account of the dispute with the Pentagon on February 26. President Trump’s Truth Social broadside calling Anthropic “radical left” and “woke” followed shortly after, as did Pete Hegseth’s supply chain risk designation. Each escalation generated another wave of media coverage, and each wave appears to have driven another spike in people heading to claude.ai to see what the fuss was about.
The pattern is consistent with what happened on the App Store, where Claude climbed to the number one position — above ChatGPT and Google Gemini — in what appeared to be a direct consequence of the same news cycle. Together, the App Store rankings and the SimilarWeb traffic data suggest the surge is real and broad-based, not an artefact of any single platform or metric.
What It Means For Grok And DeepSeek
The rise of Claude comes at an interesting moment for both of its rivals in this comparison. Grok had been running broadly parallel to DeepSeek through much of January and February — both platforms hovering in a similar band of daily traffic. DeepSeek had itself benefited from a major viral moment last year when its model releases attracted enormous global attention. That the Chinese AI platform had been sustaining visits in the 9 to 11 million range through February suggests its initial surge had translated into genuine retained usage rather than a one-time curiosity spike.
For Claude to now be pulling ahead of both — on the back of a political controversy rather than a model release — underscores how unpredictable the dynamics of consumer AI adoption can be. Technical benchmarks and product launches matter, but so does the news cycle.
The Bigger Question: Will It Last?
Traffic spikes driven by controversy are notoriously difficult to convert into durable user growth. The more meaningful test for Anthropic will come in the weeks ahead, when the news cycle has moved on and the company’s ability to retain the users who arrived out of curiosity will depend entirely on the quality of the product they find. Unlike ChatGPT and Gemini, Claude can’t generate images, and it has lower free rate limits as well.
That is where Anthropic’s recent moves become strategically relevant. The launch of the memory import feature — allowing users to carry their saved preferences over from ChatGPT and other rivals — was timed to capitalise on exactly this kind of influx. The company appears to understand that a traffic surge is only valuable if it can be converted into subscription revenue, and it has moved quickly to lower the switching costs for anyone arriving at claude.ai for the first time.
Whether the visitors showing up in SimilarWeb’s data become paying subscribers, or whether the line on the chart drifts back down toward its February baseline, will say a great deal about the lasting commercial impact of the most turbulent week in Anthropic’s short history.