The most popular AI tools of 2025 (and what that even means)

Moor Studio/Getty Images Popularity in the tech world is hard to measure. I've talked at length about this in my discussions of programming language popularity. It really comes down to what you use to measure popularity -- and how available those metrics are to those doing the analysis. It's difficult to generically define popularity, especially when you're including tools that do wildly different things. For example, is a general-purpose text-to-image generator like Midjourney inherently more popular than a tool that removes backgrounds from images like Remove.bg? Over the past few years, we've been carefully refining our popularity index methodology. Our indexes take a page from the world of political analysis: we aggregate survey data from multiple rankings, and weight them carefully to account for the strengths and weaknesses of each dataset. Given that the datasets have wildly different rankings and, in some cases, showcase different tools, it makes sense to apply a normalizin ... Read full article.