One order in every country
OpenApps has Popular, the directory's store-wide list, for 7 countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Brazil, Türkiye and France. On Oct 13, 2026, all 7 show the same 50 apps in the same order, not only the same top 9.
For every list we also have the top 100 in each country. Across 16 lists and the 41 countries with data besides the US, that is 656 country lists, and in every one of them the apps a country shows appear in the same order as in the US. What a country changes is which apps are listed. When an app is missing, the apps below it close the gap, so an app can sit a few places higher in Ukraine, where 63 apps from US top-100 lists aren't listed, than in the US, without anything having moved.
Data is not available for six countries (Belgium, Bulgaria, Ireland, Romania, Serbia and Slovenia). We count them as unknown, not absent, which is why we say 42 countries with data rather than 48. Which apps are missing where is in Why country availability matters.
What the lists are
The directory is built from 16 lists. 13 are category lists, from 1,400 apps in Productivity down to 28 in Scientific Research. Three are collections: Popular (50 apps), New & Noteworthy (18) and Small Business (16).
Popular is the global top 50, cut across categories. Its #1, Remote Desktop Commander, is #1 in Developer Tools; its #2, Google Drive, is #1 in Productivity. Across the 13 category lists there are 321 pairs of apps that also sit in Popular, and every pair comes in the same order in both lists. That is what one order behind every list looks like from the outside.
List size changes what a rank means. #40 in Security (46 apps) is near the bottom of its list; #40 in Productivity is in the top 3%.
Shelves are windows of the lists
The home page doesn't add a second order. Each of its 16 home shelves shows 9 apps from one list, in list order and without gaps. Productivity starts at #3, Developer Tools starts at #4 and Healthcare starts at #2, because the apps above that point are already in Popular's top 6, and category shelves don't repeat those.
So being on a shelf is the same as being near the top of a list. How to get on a ChatGPT home shelf has the shelf-by-shelf data, including the two collections that don't follow a category's order.
What moved the order this week
Four apps with a stored Popular series show the usual shape over the week to Oct 13: Canva went from #11 to #17, HubSpot went from #19 to #24, Asana went from #28 to #32 and Airtable went from #36 to #48. They lost ground in steps, at a handful of moments, and held still in between. No single step cost any of them more than 4 places.
The clearest step came on Oct 9. OpenAI's own Google Drive app went from #49 to #2 in Popular, and from #653 to #1 in Productivity. Of the 18 other apps with a stored Popular series, 17 slid exactly one place at that moment; the one that didn't was Popular's #1, which sat above the new #2. Their order among themselves didn't change. One app was placed above them.
CanvaHubSpotAsanaAirtable
Read every line in this chart the same way. Canva's fall from #11 to #17 says that 6 more apps sit above it than at the start of the week; on its own it says nothing about Canva. Every app placed above Canva is also above Airtable, so the lower an app sits, the more of these steps it collects: over the same days Canva lost 6 places and Airtable 12. To see whether an app itself moved, compare it only with apps that were there both times. That is cohort rank, and the Movers page ranks by it.
OpenAI has said the directory order has weighed retention since Aug 21, 2026. We can't see retention, so we can't say whether it moved Google Drive, or anything else.
What a directory rank can't tell you
- How many people use an app. A rank is a position in an order, not a count. ChatGPT doesn't publish how many people use an app, and we don't estimate it.
- What happens inside a chat. ChatGPT can suggest an app in a conversation. Those suggestions aren't part of the directory, so an app can matter more or less to its users than its directory rank says.
- Anything beyond the directory. Our ranks describe one surface: the directory's lists and shelves as a new visitor in each country sees them.
- Long trends. A week of steps is news, not a trend. Read a move against several weeks before you call it one.
What a rank can tell you is where an app stands in the one order every country shares, among the store's 6,611 listings, though each country leaves some of them out. Read it against the size of its list, read change by cohort rank, and check country presence rather than country position. How to read rank changes covers the second part.