In January 2025, a previously unknown company made an announcement that shocked the booming tech sector.
Most people outside of the Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) industry didn’t know the name DeepSeek. But the little-known startup triggered a selloff that sent some of the most powerful AI stocks, including Nvidia (NVDA) , into free fall.
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The company had this impact because its new large language model (LLM), titled the DeepSeek-R1, had been trained for only $5.6 million, substantially less than many experts believed possible, and built on older, less advanced AI chips. This cast doubt over the projections made by AI leaders, triggering a fast selloff.
Over a month later, the dust has mostly settled as the industry adjusts to this unexpected newcomer. A recent study has answered a question posed by many AI enthusiasts: which company is the most impacted by DeepSeek?
Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has significantly disrupted the AI market recently, causing problems for other companies (Photo Illustration by May James/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
The AI market’s biggest loser in the post-DeepSeek era
While the AI stocks that plunged following DeepSeek’s recent launch have since stabilized, it is clear that the market has a powerful new AI model. Its larger peers are having to adjust to having a new competitor that may be able to outshine them as it continues to grow.
This applies to companies of all sizes. While the spotlight often focuses on ChatGPT maker OpenAI and fast-growing startup Anthropic, Google (GOOGL) ’s Gemini AI platform has recently made waves as well.
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All three companies have seen their searches decline since the launch of the DeepSeek-R1, but according to recent data, the most impacted company is not one of the aforementioned names. It’s Perplexity AI, an AI-driven search engine geared toward answering questions with natural language processing.
The report from Slot.Day analyzed user engagement with AI tools after the DeepSeek release, ranking them by the loss of interest. It accounted for “monthly searches, the latest changes for each AI tool, and parent companies’ worth,” collecting data from the Google keyword planner.
According to its findings, searches for Perplexity AI have declined 33% since the DeepSeek breakthrough. Second on the list of most impacted companies is Chatspot by Hubspot (HUBS) , whose searches are down 22%.
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Google Gemini and Claude from Anthropic both saw searches decline 18%, as did Jasper AI’s Jasperchat and Botsify. ChatGPT came in just below them with 17% search declines. However, they fell only 3% for Intercom.
While searches are falling for its rivals, they are rising for DeepSeek
Meanwhile, the report shows that DeepSeek’s searches have surged by an astounding 321%, exceeding those of every AI chatbot on the list except for ChatGPT and Gemini. However, searches are up 49% for the Alibaba (BABAF) Qwen 2.5 chatbot.
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Absent from the list of impacted companies are the Microsoft (MSFT) Copilot AI chatbot and Grok, the AI model produced by Elon Musk’s xAI. The company did not offer any context as to why these names were not included.
A spokesperson from the market research firm issued the following statement on the report and its findings:
“The AI field is seeing rapid breakthroughs with new models like DeepSeek emerging almost weekly, transforming the industry and affecting even the established leaders. We’re again seeing how open-source AI models reshape the market, become more accessible to developers and researchers worldwide and, potentially, lead to better-performing tools at a fraction of the cost.”
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