Super Bowl Ad Benchmarks: Anthropic Outperforms OpenAI but ai.com Dominates with 9.1x Traffic Surge

Advertising metrics firm EDO has released detailed performance data from Super Bowl LX, revealing a fascinating battle in the AI advertising space. According to their real-time tracking of search traffic and website visits, Anthropic's Claude advertisements significantly outperformed OpenAI's spots—but both were eclipsed by an unexpected contender: ai.com, which achieved a staggering 9.1x average engagement multiplier that immediately crashed its servers.

Performance Benchmarks Breakdown
EDO's methodology tracks immediate viewer engagement by measuring search volume spikes and concurrent website visits within minutes of ad airings. Their subway-style leaderboard shows:

Advertiser	Product	Ranking	Engagement Multiplier
ai.com	AGI platform	1st	9.1x
Anthropic	Claude (Ad #1)	12th	Not disclosed
Anthropic	Claude (Ad #2)	13th	Not disclosed
Salesforce	Vault promotion	14th	Not disclosed
OpenAI	Codex tool	24th	Not disclosed

ai.com's performance dwarfed even mainstream hits like Universal's Minions trailer and Dunkin' Donuts' celebrity-packed spot. The domain—recently acquired by Crypto.com founder Kris Marszalek—pitched user-built AI agents with a provocative "AGI is coming" message that explicitly trolled industry figures like Elon Musk and Sam Altman.

Infrastructure Implications
The immediate technical consequence was catastrophic: ai.com's infrastructure collapsed under the traffic deluge. This highlights critical scalability challenges for services anticipating viral demand:

• Traffic Volume Analysis: Conservative estimates based on EDO's 9.1x multiplier suggest ai.com sustained at least 2 million concurrent visitors. This exceeds typical CDN caching thresholds and requires distributed edge computing.
• Server Load Requirements: Handling such spikes demands horizontally scalable architectures. For comparison, Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's ChatGPT—both hosted on robust cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP)—showed no reported outages despite heavy traffic.
• Hardware Recommendations: Homelab builders replicating high-availability services should note:
  • Compute: Epyc 9654 or Xeon w9-3495X CPUs with 32+ cores to manage concurrent requests
  • Networking: 100Gbps NICs with BGP anycast routing
  • Caching: Redis/Memcached clusters with sub-millisecond response times
  • Fallback: Multi-region Kubernetes clusters with automatic pod scaling

Ad Content Analysis
Anthropic's ads cleverly weaponized their anti-advertising stance. One spot depicted an AI therapist inappropriately recommending a "sensitive cubs meet roaring cougars" dating site during a session—a direct jab at ad-supported models. Another showed a fitness AI pushing shoe lifts after learning a user's height. This contrasted sharply with OpenAI's sentimental Codex ad tracing a developer's journey from cardboard prototypes to professional coding.

Technical Takeaways
The traffic patterns reveal several infrastructure insights:

1. Peak Load Timing: All AI services saw traffic surges within 90 seconds of ad airings, requiring pre-warmed autoscaling groups.
2. Authentication Bottlenecks: ai.com's controversial credit-card "human verification" likely exacerbated their outage by adding database transactions to the request pipeline.
3. Ad-to-Tech Alignment: Anthropic's ads explicitly referenced their no-ads policy—a feature that may have contributed to their strong engagement without corresponding infrastructure stress.

For homelab enthusiasts, this event provides a real-world case study in designing for black swan traffic events. The winning ad's technical failure underscores that even compelling messaging means little without proper load balancing, while the runners-up demonstrate how established cloud architectures handle unexpected demand. Full EDO rankings remain undisclosed, but the data proves that in advertising—as in infrastructure—benchmarks separate contenders from pretenders.

Relevant Resources

• EDO Advertising Analytics Methodology
• Anthropic's No-Ads Policy Announcement
• AWS Auto Scaling Best Practices
• Kubernetes Horizontal Pod Autoscaler Documentation