RankDude

Phia got six times bigger. The rest of the market shrank.

Phia now gets half of all Google visits to AI shopping assistants, and without it the market shrank.

Written by Miles Foster, Owner and tester, RankDude. / 2 min read

AI shopping assistant sites just hit a two-year high, RankDude data shows. They got about 143,000 visits from Google in September 2026. One app did most of the work: Phia, up from about 11,900 visits to about 71,700. Here's the twist.

The short version

  • 6x: Phia's growth in Google visits in a year.
  • Half: Phia's share of all visits in September.
  • -11.6%: the rest of the market, without Phia.
  • -44.4%: US searches for the brand names.

WorldGoogle visits to AI shopping assistants

050.0K100K150K200KOct 24Dec 24Feb 25Apr 25Jun 25Aug 25Oct 25Dec 25Feb 26Apr 26Jun 26Sep 26143K
Low 50.3KHigh 143KAverage 98.5K
Hover, tap, or use the arrow keys to inspect a month

Estimated monthly visits, smoothed for one-off spikes. Source: RankDude analysis of DataForSEO data.

One app, half the pie

Phia got about 71,700 visits from Google in September. That's half of everyone's visits put together.

Over the year, Phia added about 59,800 visits. The whole market added only about 50,400.

So Phia grew more than the market did. That means the other sites lost ground between them.

So who is behind this app?

Who is Phia?

Phia was co-founded by Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni.

Fortune reported an $8 million seed round in September 2025, led by Kleiner Perkins.

Then came a $35 million round in 2026, led by Notable Capital. Fortune said it valued Phia at around $185 million.

The numbers

Phia's Google visits, one yearin 12 months
6x
Phia's share of all visitsSeptember 2026
50%
US searches for brand namesin 12 months
-44%

The September surprise

Phia jumped 45.7% in a single month. The other sites together fell 18.5%.

The market still rose 4.6%. But without Phia, it would have gone down.

And one rival had an even wilder month.

Alta's wild ride

Alta more than doubled over the year, to about 20,100 visits.

Then it lost about half in one month. In August it had about 38,900.

Manifest AI went the other way. It fell 61% in a year, to about 11,600.

ShopSavvy grew 82%, to about 20,600. That makes it the second most visited site.

The top five sites now get about 9 in 10 visits. You can see every site in the monthly analysis or on the AI shopping assistant statistics page.

But the strangest number is still to come.

Nobody says the name

Here's the odd part. Visits went up, but searches for the brand names went down.

US name searches fell 44.4% in a year, to 8,270 a month. Worldwide, they fell 36.4%.

Phia shows it best. US searches for its name fell from 12,100 in July to 4,400 in September. Yet its visits kept climbing.

My guess? People find these sites by searching for products and deals, not app names. That's not a measured fact.

Here's why that matters to you. Visits like that can vanish fast if Google changes what it shows.

One more thing

Fortune, citing a July 2026 Bloomberg investigation, reported an allegation about Phia's browser extension.

The report said the extension put Phia's own referral code at checkout, over other publishers' codes.

Phia said the features behind this were removed on July 7.

“If one app does all the growing, it's one app's story.”

Miles Foster

How I measured this

Visits are DataForSEO estimates of monthly visits from Google, worldwide unless I say US. Name searches are monthly Google search volumes for each brand name. These are estimates, not people, and I smoothed one-off spikes; more on my methodology and the DataForSEO page.

Source: RankDude analysis of DataForSEO data, September 2026.

On this site

Sources

  1. Fortune, “Hailey Bieber and Kris Jenner back Phoebe Gates' fashion tech startup Phia in $8 million seed round”, 17 September 2025.
  2. Fortune, “'I have a chip on my shoulder.' Phoebe Gates wants her $185 million AI startup Phia to succeed with 'no ties to my privilege or my last name'”, 15 August 2026.

Figures about the sites I track come from RankDude’s own monthly data (DataForSEO, Google Ads keyword data, Tranco, Google Chrome UX Report, Ahrefs, SerpApi and Google Trends); the figures here are for September 2026, published 15 October 2026, next update 1 November 2026. Each tool is explained on the testing tools pages. Reported facts about other companies are as published by the sources above.

Miles FosterOwner and tester, RankDude. Miles Foster owns RankDude and runs every hands-on test in person: one written procedure per category, the same sample sizes and scoring for every tool in it, with the measurements and screenshots published on each review's full test results.

More from the blog