Anthropic’s Super Bowl ads — featuring darkly comic scenarios of people seeking advice from chatbots, only to be directed to “cougar” dating sites and height-enhancing soles — paid off. In the days since, Anthropic’s AI chatbot Claude has climbed from No. 41 on the US App Store to become one of the top 10 apps. As of Friday, Claude is at No. 7 — its highest ranking to date — suggesting that “ad-free” is resonating strongly with users.
According to new data from the market intelligence provider AppfiguresClaude’s US downloads on both iOS and Android are estimated to have totaled 148,000 from Sunday to Tuesday — the most recent data available. This is a 32% increase over the previous three-day period, Thursday through Saturday, where downloads totaled around 112,000.
Claude’s Sunday-Tuesday average daily downloads were 49,200, up 32% from its usual Sunday-Tuesday average of 37,400 downloads per day.
The numbers suggest that Anthropic’s Super Bowl ads, combined with Anthropic’s recent release of the new Opus 4.6 model, worked to draw attention to Claude’s app and its key differentiator from ChatGPT. The latter rolled out ads to free users this week, as Anthropic’s ads had warned.
As a result, Claude’s app is gaining more attention than when it first debuted on mobile.
The consumer-focused AI app arrived on iOS in May 2024 to a rather lukewarm reception. ChatGPT had won it in the mobile market and had grown to nearly half a million installs in its first five days. By comparison, Claude had only amassed 157,000 total worldwide downloads within its first week and did not rank higher than No. 55 in the US App Store.
Globally, Claude saw some gains last week as well. Claude’s total worldwide downloads on both the App Store and Google Play increased by 15% from Sunday to Tuesday compared to last Thursday to Saturday. However, that was less than half the gains seen in the US, Appfigures noted.
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