Insights
ChatGPT Grew Another 55.8% in March, Overtaking Bing and DuckDuckGo
OpenAI’s chatbot retains a wide lead in AI chat and is among the leaders if counted as a search engine
OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot continued its enviable pattern of growth, with worldwide traffic up 55.8% from February, according to Similarweb’s preliminary estimates for March.
Key takeaways
- ChatGPT attracted nearly 1.6 billion worldwide visits to chat.openai.com in March, up from just over 1 billion in February.
- Considered a type of search engine, ChatGPT is ahead of Bing (957 million visits) and DuckDuckGo (857.6 million) in worldwide traffic, although it lags Baidu, Yandex, and (of course) Google.
- Google’s Bard chatbot, which is in the early stages of introduction as a beta service, drew 30.6 million visits to bard.google.com, making itself #3 among the web domains dedicated to that purpose (not counting Bing’s chatbot, which is embedded in bing.com). #2 is Character.ai, which was founded by former Google engineers.
- ChatGPT’s growth in the context of the search is most impressive on a worldwide basis. In the U.S., ChatGPT falls behind Bing, DuckDuckGo, and (of course) Google.
ChatGPT in the context of search
ChatGPT is not exactly a search engine, but it is often considered a part of a potential post-search future for the web, which Microsoft is embracing by incorporating ChatGPT technology into Bing and Google is so far keeping at arm’s length, with bard.google.com being introduced as a separate beta service. To simplify comparisons with Google, which has many services like Gmail at subdomains of google.com, the comparisons used here are filtered to traffic from the main domains of google.com, bing.com, and other competitors.
Here is where ChatGPT falls among the major search engines, worldwide – still barely registering in comparison to Google …
… but coming on strong among the challengers to Google.
ChatGPT compared with other AI chat services
ChatGPT is far and away the dominant stand-alone AI chat service.
Google’s Bard service, still in limited beta release, is starting to make its presence felt as a #3 player behind Character.AI (founded by former Google technologists who grew impatient with the company’s hesitance to release a product in this category).
How the rankings are different in the US and India
The intensity of interest in ChatGPT varies across the globe, with India rivaling the volume of traffic coming from the US. Here’s what the top geographies looked like as of February.
In the US, ChatGPT is a strong #3 among the challengers to Google search.
On the other hand, in India, which accounts for about 11% of the global traffic to ChatGPT, ChatGPT is getting more traffic than any search engine other than Google.
ChatGPT’s 55.8% month-over-month gain for March is not quite as big as it was in January (131.6%) or February (62.5%) – but still huge enough to place it among the top tier of all digital properties, worldwide.
The Similarweb Insights & Communications team is available to pull additional or updated data on request for the news media (journalists are invited to write to press@similarweb.com). When citing our data, please reference Similarweb as the source and link back to the most relevant blog post or similarweb.com/blog/insights/.
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