China's AI Traffic Top 20 (Feb 2026): DeepSeek Dominates, Doubao Solid Second, and Kimi Breaks into Top 3

I. Structural Dominance: The Tier-1 Duopoly

DeepSeek and Doubao have solidified their positions as the undisputed Tier 1, establishing a stable duopoly in China's AI traffic landscape.

• DeepSeek (Top 1): Despite the long-overdue release of DeepSeek V4, which has notably fallen behind market expectations, the incumbent titan remains the undisputed leader with a staggering 273.21M monthly visits. Currently, DeepSeek alone commands 53.47% of the combined Top 20 volume — a textbook case of "discontinuous dominance." Notably, its traffic is globally balanced, with over 60% originating from overseas, reflecting its formidable international competitiveness.
• Doubao (Top 2): ByteDance's Doubao maintained its position with nearly 100M visits. Leveraging ByteDance's unparalleled ecosystem integration and seamless multimodal UX, it remains a pillar of the elite "100-Million Club." In the near term, Doubao stands as the most formidable challenger to DeepSeek's supremacy. However, its footprint remains heavily domestic, with China-based traffic exceeding 90%, contrasting sharply with DeepSeek's globalized profile.

II. The "Contrarian" Surge: Kimi and Zhipu AI (z.ai)

Amidst the Lunar New Year holiday — which typically triggers a sharp downturn in productivity tool usage — Kimi and Zhipu AI emerged as the only "dark horses" in the Top 10 to achieve significant contrarian growth.

• Kimi (Top 3): Defying the seasonal slump, Kimi (+34.24%) officially overtook Alibaba's Qwen (Tongyi Qianwen) to claim the #3 spot, successfully breaking the "Big Three" hierarchy. This surge was fueled by the generational capability leap in the Kimi 2.5 model and the viral adoption of ecosystem services like OpenClaw. By precision-targeting "Deep Research" and "Long-Context Productivity," Kimi has secured high-retention user loyalty, achieving remarkable growth while the broader industry contracted.
• Zhipu AI (Top 6): Zhipu AI (+19.22%) demonstrated a masterclass in "Global Arbitrage Strategy." Its flagship GLM-5 series achieved a major breakthrough in coding capability, triggering a massive influx of global developers. Crucially, Zhipu's z.ai domain strategy has been a triumph: with domestic (China) traffic accounting for only 16% of its volume, this deep international penetration served as a perfect hedge against the domestic holiday slowdown. On Web traffic alone, z.ai has surpassed Keling; when combined with the 2.71M visits from Zhipu's domestic domain chatglm.cn, Zhipu's aggregate footprint now outpaces Tencent's Yuanbao, breaking into the industry's top 5.

III. Dimensional Divergence and Emerging Challengers

As the industry matures, we are witnessing a structural decoupling of the market: while generalized AI search tools face consolidation, specialized video generators and vertical-specific models are carving out distinct, high-growth survival paths.

• Video Generation (Global Pioneers): Tools like Kling, PixVerse, and Vidu continue to showcase a strong "global-first" DNA. Compared to text-only LLMs, their international traffic share is significantly higher, positioning them as the "vanguard" of China's AI global expansion. Following Sora's strategic retreat from the market, Chinese video models are expected to maintain a formidable competitive advantage in the global creative landscape.
• AI Search (The Squeeze): Traffic for independent AI search tools continued to trend downward in February. This "squeezing effect" is largely driven by the enhanced search capabilities within flagship LLMs like DeepSeek and Kimi. As generalized models provide increasingly precise "search + reasoning" experiences, the survival space for standalone vertical search tools is being rapidly compressed.
• The "Gatekeeper" (Wenxiaobai): Surprisingly, Yuanshi Technology's Wenxiaobai demonstrated remarkable resilience, consistently outperforming veterans like Baidu's Wenxin Yiyan to secure the #11 spot. As the Top 10 "gatekeeper," its resilient traffic baseline amidst fierce incumbent competition is a compelling validation of its differentiated UX — a rare outlier in a saturated market.
• Vertical Explosions (New Forces): The medical LLM Ant Afu (+305.67%) delivered a stunning growth surge, showcasing the explosive potential of domain-specific AI and displacing established players like Baichuan's Baixiaoying. Simultaneously, StepFun (+99.77%) nearly doubled its traffic; although its current base remains small, this explosive growth rate signals high market expectations for its next-generation model capabilities.