ChatGPT Recovers to Near-Peak Levels

ChatGPT web traffic is back to within 10% of its April 2023 peak worldwide and within 4% of that level in the US

ChatGPT’s traffic hit a lull over the summer, dipping significantly from its Spring 2023 highs, but has recovered significantly in recent weeks. As we’ve previously reported, that may have something to do with US schools being back in session and students returning to chat.openai.com as a source of homework help. It could also reflect improvements ChatGPT owner OpenAI has been making in the product.

ChatGPT remains far and away the most popular pure-play AI Chat product, attracting more global traffic than bing.com, even as Microsoft’s search engine incorporates OpenAI tech to transform the search experience.

Key takeaways

• We’re sharing a weekly breakdown of traffic data to show recent trends, and traffic to chat.openai.com over the last seven-day period is back to within 10% of the peak levels we saw in April 2023, worldwide, and 4% of that level in the US.
• On a monthly basis, ChatGPT peaked at 1.8 billion worldwide visits in May before dropping to 1.4 billion in August. In September, it bounced back to about 1.5 billion – and based on the last few weeks of data could reach as high as 1.7 billion visits in October.
• In the US, peak traffic for the ChatGPT website was 187.5 million visits in April before dropping to 137.4 million in June. In September it was back to 164.3 million, and based on the last few weeks of traffic we might see more than 195 million visits for October, setting a new high.
• For the full month of September, ChatGPT attracted 1.5 billion worldwide visits compared with nearly 1.7 billion in April.
• Google Bard, Google’s answer to ChatGPT, got 219.3 million website visits in September, up 19.5% from the previous month. Probably more significant than Bard for Google’s future is the arrival of the Search Generative Experience, which is attracting intense interest through Google Labs because of its potential to upend the state of the art in organic search marketing.

Reversing the dip

ChatGPT’s stature as one of the world’s largest websites began with it reaching 2 million worldwide visits within a week, 10 million by its second week, and then compounding that growth in almost every week that followed until about April or May. In comparison, it’s now experiencing less extraordinary but still steady growth of a few percent per week.

ChatGPT as an app

ChatGPT was a website for the first months of its existence, and has only been available in the form of an app for a few months. However, user engagement with the ChatGPT app is growing. Here, we’re showing the picture for iOS and Android combined in the US.

Worldwide, the picture on Android is much the same.

ChatGPT is back in a big way

It turns out interest in AI chat is not dying out after all. ChatGPT looks likely to hit new highs in the coming months.

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Report By: David F. Carr, Senior Insights Manager

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".