Bing Gets a 15% Daily Traffic Bump from ChatGPT Integration

Often counted out in a search engine market dominated by Google, Microsoft’s Bing showed early gains from Tuesday’s announcement of a new Bing search incorporating OpenAI’s ChatGPT technology.

Key takeaways

• The bing.com main domain attracted 30.3 million visits on Feb. 7 (the day of multiple news reports about and positive previews of the feature). By Wednesday, Feb. 8, it was up to 31.7 million. That’s 15% higher than the average daily volume for the past six months, which was about 27.5 million daily visits, according to Similarweb estimates.
• Even before this news, Bing was making gains. Traffic to the bing.com main domain is up 2.9% over the past year, while traffic to google.com is down 2.1%. For this analysis, we made our estimates for bing.com versus google.com more comparable by filtering out traffic to subdomains associated with maps, mail, and other services.
• Users of other top search engines are taking notice, as evidenced by a 700% increase in search volume on the keywords “bing ai.”

Microsoft has embarked on a “multiyear, multi-billion dollar” partnership and investment in OpenAI and has also announced plans to incorporate ChatGPT and DALL-E image generation capabilities into its Office suite.

Adding ChatGPT to the search engine means Bing will be able to respond to a query with an essay about the topic and elaborate on the answer in response to further prompts, rather than simply spitting out a list of links. This version of AI chat is also informed about current events, as opposed to the standard ChatGPT at chat.openai.com, which was trained on data from 2021.

Bing traffic volume has been rising over the past year, possibly at Google’s expense

Traffic to the bing.com main domain is up 2.9% over the past year, while traffic to google.com is down 2.1%.

A modest uptick on a daily basis

The immediate traffic bump from the ChatGPT announcement doesn’t look particularly impressive on a chart, but by Wednesday traffic to the site was 15% higher than on an average day over the last six months.

Search volume for “bing ai”

Meanwhile, a weekly search keywords breakdown shows a 700% increase for the term “bing ai” – people trying to find out more about the news and what it means.

Still a long way to go

These encouraging signs for Bing have to be taken with a grain of salt – and a sense of scale. Google remains a long ways away from facing any kind of serious competitive threat, and as of January Bing lagged behind DuckDuckGo among the challenger search engines.

If we take Google out of the mix, here’s what the ranking of the challengers looks like.

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Methodology

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by David F. Carr

David covers social media, digital advertising, and generative AI. With a background in web trends since the 1990s, he’s also the author of "Social Collaboration for Dummies".