AI tool category distribution: the July 2026 split
On 28 July 2026 this index held 209 live listings, unevenly spread: marketing 27, productivity 22, analytics 21, agents 20, coding 20, video 18, writing 18, design 18, research 13, chatbots 12, audio 10, images 10. The spread tracks how cheap a category is to enter, not how useful it is.
By the The AI Tools Index team
A single total hides the only interesting thing about a catalog, which is its shape. Here is the full 28 July 2026 split of this index, category by category, adding to 209 because each listing is filed exactly once.
- Marketing 27, productivity 22, analytics 21.
- Agents 20, coding 20.
- Video 18, writing 18, design 18.
- Research 13, chatbots 12.
- Audio 10, images 10.
What explains the top of the list?
Cost of entry, mostly. Marketing at 27 listings is the largest category here because the unit economics are forgiving: text and workflow are cheap to serve, the buyer has a budget line already, and the value is easy to demonstrate in a trial. Productivity at 22 and analytics at 21 follow for similar reasons.
Nothing in the ranking says marketing tools are better. It says the category is easier to start a company in, which is a fact about supply and not about quality.
What explains the bottom?
Compute and rights. Audio and images sit joint last at 10 listings each, and both carry a high cost per unit of output plus a live legal question about what the output is. Udio disabled downloads after settling with Universal Music Group in October 2025 and with Warner, which is the kind of change that reshapes an entire category's product design rather than one company's roadmap.
Research at 13 is small for a third reason: building retrieval over a real corpus is slow and expensive, so fewer products launch and more of them are acquired.
Which categories move fastest?
Agents and video, for opposite reasons. Agents changes because the definition itself is unsettled and products keep crossing the line into and out of the category. Video changes because the products themselves come and go: OpenAI's discontinuation notice put Sora's web and app shutdown at 26 April 2026 and its API at 24 September 2026.
Writing and design are the most stable rows in the table. They were stable last quarter and are likely to be stable next quarter, which is worth knowing if you are buying something to keep for a year.
What this distribution is not
It is not a market share estimate, a popularity ranking, or a picture of the whole AI tool market. It is the shape of one curated catalog on one date, under one published inclusion method, and it is useful precisely to the extent that those three qualifications are attached to it every time it is quoted.
How to use the shape when you are shopping
Big category, narrow your criteria before you browse. Small category, read all of it. With 10 image listings you can genuinely look at every entry in an afternoon; with 27 marketing listings you need a constraint first, and the constraint that eliminates fastest is usually price or export format rather than capability.