DeepSeek Statistics October 2026: Users, Traffic, Revenue, V4.1 Models & Pricing

Key takeaways

DeepSeek's China user base is shrinking slightly. QuestMobile counted 129 million monthly active users in June 2026 and 123 million in September, placing it among the top AI-native apps in China.
Outside China it is a small brand. deepseek.com drew 353.8 million visits in August, about 6% of chatgpt.com's traffic. DeepSeek holds 3.4% of AI chatbot web traffic on Similarweb's global measure but only 0.4% of US chatbot usage on First Page Sage's.
It is earning real money. The Information reported about $1 billion in annualised revenue in September 2026, and revenue of 475 million yuan for January through July.
Funding is in motion. Reuters reported on October 22 that DeepSeek is raising a further round of about 100 billion yuan, roughly $15 billion, citing four sources. The round was not confirmed as closed.
Developers use it far more than consumers do. DeepSeek's models had 371 million downloads on Hugging Face by September 10, 2026.
It competes on price and ships fast. V4.1-Flash costs $0.30 per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output at peak, and half that off-peak. V4 Pro went to general release on August 13, V4.1-Flash on September 10 and an update followed on October 17.
Business adoption is tiny. Ramp's data shows DeepSeek paid for by 0.3% of US businesses in September 2026, up from 0.2% in August.
The audience is young and mostly male. 63.31% of visitors are male, and 25–34 year olds, at 32.53%, are the largest group.

DeepSeek shook the AI market in early 2025 by matching frontier models at a fraction of the cost. Since then its position has split in two. In China it is one of the most-used AI apps, and it now has the revenue and investor interest of a serious company. In the US and Europe it is a minor chatbot, while its open models are widely downloaded and built on by developers. For brands, that makes DeepSeek a research and developer story more than a discovery channel: it matters if your audience is in China or builds on open models, and much less if you are tracking where Western buyers ask questions. For the platforms that do drive discovery, see our ChatGPT and Perplexity statistics.

Here is a full breakdown of the numbers as of October 2026.

How many people use DeepSeek?

DeepSeek does not publish a user count. The figures in circulation come from third-party trackers, and they measure different things:

China app users: 129 million monthly active users in June 2026, falling to 123 million in September, per QuestMobile's Q3 report published October 20, 2026.
Website traffic: deepseek.com drew 353.8 million visits in August 2026, per Similarweb, about 6% of chatgpt.com's traffic that month.
Developer downloads: DeepSeek models had 371 million downloads on Hugging Face as of September 10, 2026.
US chatbot usage: First Page Sage estimates DeepSeek at 0.4% of US chatbot usage in October 2026.

Sources: Second Talent, September 10, 2026; Gradually, November 2026; First Page Sage, November 2026. The gap between 3.4% of global web traffic and 0.4% of US usage shows how much of DeepSeek's audience sits outside the United States.

Revenue and funding

DeepSeek was long known for not selling much. That has changed:

Figure	Value	Source
Revenue, January to July 2026	475 million yuan	The Information, via IT Home, August 26, 2026
Annualised revenue run rate, September 2026	About $1 billion	The Information, citing two sources
New funding round, reported October 22, 2026	About 100 billion yuan (~$15 billion)	Reuters, citing four sources; not confirmed closed

Source: Gradually, DeepSeek Statistics 2026, November 5, 2026. The run-rate figure is a month annualised and the funding round is unconfirmed, so both are directional. They still mark a shift toward a company with meaningful revenue and outside investors.

Models and release cadence

Date	Release
August 13, 2026	DeepSeek V4 Pro general release: 1.6 trillion parameters, 49 billion active per token
September 10, 2026	DeepSeek V4.1-Flash reaches the API: multimodal, mixture-of-experts, up to a 1 million token context window, MIT licence
September 14, 2026	V4 Pro requests start routing to V4.1-Flash
October 17, 2026	DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017: stronger benchmarks, faster task completion, shorter outputs, and Search and Fetch APIs open to everyone

Source: Second Talent, September 10, 2026; DeepSeek API docs, October 2026; Gradually, November 2026. DeepSeek's own benchmark figures improved between the September and October versions of V4.1-Flash:

Benchmark	V4.1-Flash (September 10)	V4.1-Flash-1017 (October 17)
Humanity's Last Exam	36.8%	42.6%
Terminal-Bench 4.0	31.2%	42.3%
DeepSWE v1.1	74.2%	77.0%

These are DeepSeek's own reported results. For comparison, Google reports 77.9% for Gemini 4 Argon on DeepSWE v1.1, per our Gemini statistics. Search and Fetch calls through server-side tools are free for API users until October 31, 2026 at 16:00 UTC, then cost $0.75 per 1,000 calls for each endpoint.

API pricing

DeepSeek charges less at off-peak hours. Prices per million tokens, effective September 2026:

Model	Input (peak / off-peak)	Output (peak / off-peak)
DeepSeek V4.1-Flash	$0.30 / $0.15	$1.20 / $0.60
DeepSeek V4 Pro (cache miss)	$1.32 / $0.66	$3.96 / $1.98

Source: DeepSeek pricing page via Second Talent, September 2026. For comparison, Claude Sonnet 5.5 costs $2 input and $10 output per million tokens and Claude Haiku 5.5 starts at $0.10 and $0.50, per our Claude statistics, and Gemini 4 Argon launched at $2 and $10.

Who uses DeepSeek?

DeepSeek's audience skews young and male, even more than most AI assistants.

Age group	Share of visitors
18–24	21.31%
25–34	32.53%
35–44	21.03%
45–54	12.87%
55–64	7.6%
65+	4.67%

Source: Similarweb, deepseek.com audience data, November 2026. By gender, 63.31% of visitors are male and 36.69% are female. Visitors under 35 make up 53.84% of the audience.

Where does DeepSeek's traffic come from?

Country	Share of desktop traffic (August 2026)
China	51.43%
Russia	8.27%
United States	5.86%

Source: Similarweb via Second Talent, September 2026. Just over half of desktop traffic comes from China, and Similarweb's latest page has China at 50.47%. The US share is under 6%.

Business adoption

Ramp's data from card spend at 85,000+ US firms shows how little DeepSeek is used by paying businesses:

AI vendor	Share of US businesses paying (Sep 2026)	Aug 2026
Anthropic	43.8%	43.5%
OpenAI	40.6%	39.5%
xAI	4.1%	3.5%
DeepSeek	0.3%	0.2%
Mistral AI	0.2%	0.2%

Source: Ramp AI Index, September 2026 data. Ramp notes it likely understates adoption because many firms use free AI tools.

How DeepSeek compares to the competition

Market share: AI chatbot web traffic

Platform	Oct 2025	Apr 2026	Jul 2026	Aug 2026	Sep 2026
ChatGPT	71.8%	53.7%	54.3%	55.6%	56.4%
Google Gemini	13.6%	26.7%	26.6%	25.6%	25.0%
Claude	2.3%	8.0%	9.6%	9.3%	9.6%
DeepSeek	4.1%	4.0%	3.4%	3.5%	3.4%
Grok	2.8%	3.2%	2.5%	2.5%	2.3%
Microsoft Copilot	2.0%	2.0%	1.7%	1.6%	1.5%
Perplexity	2.5%	1.5%	1.0%	0.9%	0.9%

Source: Similarweb, gen AI website traffic share, via Rhino Rank, November 2026. DeepSeek is fourth by global web traffic and has held between 3.4% and 4.1% all year, a stable position next to its slightly declining China app users.

Market share: US chatbot usage and referrals

First Page Sage's October 2026 ranking of US chatbot usage has ChatGPT at 52.3%, Gemini at 26.3%, Claude at 11.2%, Grok at 3.4%, Perplexity at 1.8%, Microsoft Copilot at 1.3%, DeepSeek at 0.4% and Meta AI at 0.1%. On Statcounter's measure of clicks sent to websites, DeepSeek held 0.02% in August and September and 0.05% in October 2026, against 51.58% for ChatGPT and 28.86% for Gemini. Sources: First Page Sage, November 2026; Statcounter Global Stats, October 2026.