Grok's Mobile Revenue More Than Doubled This Summer
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If you're on X, you know that in the last couple of months Elon Musk has been pushing Grok's new features in a massive way, actively posting and reposting videos created with Imagine, benchmarks of Grok 4, and updates to its new characters.
xAI has been busy this summer, taking on AI video generation, AI characters, and rolling out a new version of its model.
The features, and Elon's promotion, pushed Grok's revenue to a new high this summer. And the growth came. Faster than any other competitor!
According to Appfigures Intelligence, Grok ended August with $6.8M of net revenue (after store fees), the highest the app has seen since its release late last year.
This isn't ChatGPT money yet, but here's why it's important. In June, Grok's revenue was just $2.6M. That's an increase of 161%, a number no other competitor has seen at the same time. Not even ChatGPT!
The growth came from pretty much everywhere. Every country where Grok is available and was earning money in June has earned more in July and August, which makes sense considering this wasn't an expansion of any kind but rather a feature rollout.
It's interesting to see how quickly updates like these are "consumed" by users. And by consume I mean they're willing to pay for them, not just use them.
I compared this revenue growth to Grok's competition and the data confirmed that this was the Summer of Grok™.
Grok's growth outpaced every single competitor, even though several of them saw double-digit revenue growth this summer.
Gemini and Claude, which got a lot of attention with Veo and Claude Code, respectively, were very popular, and the numbers back it up. Gemini's revenue grew 55% between June and August, and Claude's 40%.
I'm happy to see Claude's consumer app revenue growing. I believe it can still do more - a lot more - but 40% growth is great.
Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity grew 9% and 8%, respectively. It really goes to show that AI doesn't grow revenue - promotion and innovation do. The pair didn't do that much of either, and the numbers confirm it.
The one that would surprise most is ChatGPT, which didn't see any growth - revenue actually dropped by 8% this summer. If you're like me and are watching ChatGPT's numbers closely, you saw the writing on the wall in June, when revenue growth was flat. After all, now that we're a few years into AI, the growth of one platform has to come from another. And this is, again, confirmed by the numbers.
Back to Grok for a moment. This is a lot of growth in a very short amount of time, and it's leading to a very simple question - can Grok sustain this momentum?
It's too early to judge September so we'll have to wait a few more weeks to tell.
Generative AI, be it images or videos, is all the rage now as we see with Gemini's Nano Banana, which pushed Gemini to the top of the US App Store this week. I expect we'll see more on that front from all AI platforms, and will dig into Gemini in a future update.
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All figures included in this report are estimated. Unless specified otherwise, estimated revenue is always net, meaning it's the amount the developer earned after Apple and Google took their fee.
