Think Nobody’s Successfully Monetized Generative AI? Think Again.

While plenty are scoffing at the billions big tech is burning on generative AI, there’s growing evidence that a pot of gold really does wait at the end of this rainbow.

A quick takeaway from looking at aitools.xyz’s list of most trafficked AI websites is that most of these sites aren’t selling AI at all. Instead, they’re delivering services that are produced through harnessing AI. In some cases, these companies were offering the same services without the aid of AI long before AI existed in any meaningful way. Many of them were also profitable and well-known long before they adopted AI, but have seen profits grow to new heights after becoming mostly AI-driven.

Aitools.xyz is a startup that got going in March to publish an AI tools directory and analytics platform. Currently it’s tracking over 10,000 AI tools across 171 categories. In addition to offering a popularity list of AI tools based on web-site visits, it breaks AI offerings into categories in order to help users find tools to fill a particular niche.

“Until now, there hasn’t been a way to quantify AI adoption,” Sujan Sarkar, a co-founder of the company said in a statement issued when it came out of stealth in March. “Aitools.xyz provides real, data-driven insights to help businesses, investors, and researchers make informed decisions.”

Number one with a bullet on the company’s Hot 100 look at what’s happening in the AI world these days is no surprise, it’s OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a company that exists solely to sell AI as AI, and which had 40 billion visitors to its website in 2024 according to aitools.xyz. The next two companies on the list, however, are only selling AI insofar as they’re selling its use as a means to an end.

Art for AI’s Sake

In second-place is Canva, the online graphic design platform that’s designed to turn everyday folks into capable graphic designers, and which last year hosted well over 10 billion visits.

The company didn’t start life as an AI-based platform. It was originally a graphic design tool focused on templates and drag-and-drop editing. Nowadays however, artificial intelligence is deeply integrated into nearly everything users do on the site. They take advantage of Generative AI to generate images, designs, text, and more; use branded AI features such as Magic Design, Magic Write, Magic Media, Magic Edit, and Magic Eraser to automate and enhance design, content creation, and image editing tasks; interact with Canva’s AI by text or voice to brainstorm or seek advice; or take advantage of Canva Sheets, an AI powered spreadsheet program, and Canva Code, for generating code without coding skills.

Unlike openAI, which lost about $5 billion last year, Canva appears to be profitable. The company is privately held, meaning figures aren’t required to be made public, but most estimates put the company’s 2024 revenues at somewhere between $2.5 billion to $2.7 billion.

The company also doesn’t hide its AI use at all. In fact, it publicly embraces it.

“Traditionally, creative work has been defined as visual work, design, and art — but technology (from desktop computers, to painting pigments) has always played a role in shaping how people express their creativity,” Canvas’s chief product officer and co-founder, Cameron Adams, said at South by Southwest in 2024. “It’s now generative AI’s turn to change who and what is considered creative. Ideas flourish when we’re freed up from more menial, repetitive tasks, freeing up time to think about problems or topics more strategically.”

Bridging Language Gaps with AI

Following Canva in the number three position on aitools.xyz’s list is Google Translate.

Google first introduced AI to the platform in 2016, with the launch of the Google Neural Machine Translation system. These days nearly all translations performed by Google Translate are powered by AI, which isn’t surprising since Google is otherwise deeply invested in AI, including with Gemini, the company’s AI chatbox that’s number five on aitools.xyz’s list.

There’s no indication on whether Translate is contributing to Google’s bottom line, but it probably is. Although its free to use for its core features, Google monetizes some of the platform’s advanced features by restricting them to Google Workspace subscribers, which requires a paid plan.

Another language-focused platform is Duolingo, a language learning platform that offers a game-like approach in an attempt to make learning engaging and accessible, a project that came out of Carnegie Mellon University in 2011. This platform had 1.09 billion visitors in 2024, enough to put it in the number nine slot on the list.

For more than a decade after becoming a commercial product, this platform took a traditional approach to education, with everything from curriculum design to content creation being done manually by the company’s team of educators and language specialists. In 2023, Duolingo began using AI for lesson creation and content generation, and in April of this year CEO Luis von Ahn announced the company’s transition to an AI-first approach, and said that going forward AI would become central to content creation, hiring, performance reviews, and overall workflow.

Depending on your perspective, there have been both advantages and disadvantages to this approach. The main downside from where I sit — your experience may vary — is that the move allowed the company to reduce costs by getting rid of all of its contract workers. On the good side, it was able to launch 148 new language courses created with generative AI in less than a year—a process that took the company 12 years for the first 100 courses.

Like Canva, Duolingo is also profitable. This year’s reported first quarter revenue was $230.7 million, handily beating Wall Street’s expectations. The company has said that it expects 2025’s full-year revenue to be in the $987-996 million range.

Another language-centered service that’s highly invested in AI is Grammarly, the online writing assistant that helps users improve grammar, spelling, style, tone, and clarity in real time. It’s website hosted 1.16 billion visitors in 2024, which puts it at number seven on aitools.xyz’s list.

Founded in 2009 with headquarters in Kyiv, Ukraine (the company’s currently headquartered in San Francisco until it can safely return to Kyiv) the company has used AI since its inception. Early versions of the platform relied on a combination of rules-based systems and machine learning to analyze and improve text. Over time, the company expanded its use of AI to incorporate more advanced machine learning and natural language processing techniques. In 2023, Grammarly introduced GrammarlyGO as its first venture into the generative AI arena.

The company is also profitable, with 2024 revenue reaching $251.8 million, up from $178.9 million in 2023.

AI for AI’s Sake vs Purpose Driven AI

What this is getting to is that companies that are developing AI for the purpose of selling AI are still spending much more than they’re making. On the other hand, companies such as Canva, Duolingo, Grammarly, and others, which are using AI as a tool to drive a specific service, are finding profit.

The suits at the pure play AI companies — or with expensive pure play AI projects — such as openAI, Google, xAI, and the rest should find solace in that, because it indicates that there is a developing market forming underneath their AI projects.