Charting ChatGPT’s App Store of Custom GPTs

Custom GPTs are about 2.7% of ChatGPT’s worldwide traffic so far

One of the most important ways OpenAI is building on the success of ChatGPT is by supporting “Custom GPTs” – the equivalent of apps or plugins to the core platform. That’s attracting big brands and software makers like Kayak and Canva to offer integrations that way, but it also appeals to startups and individual creators.

A Custom GPT gives the chatbot a personality, which could be wild, crazy, and creative or careful and thoroughly footnoted, like the ones for academic research. It can also provide integrations with other software and data sources.

So far, custom GPTs account for about 2.7% of worldwide traffic to chat.openai.com and 4.1% of traffic from within the US. The volume of traffic to custom GPTs topped 12 million visits in the week after the launch of this feature and matched that level in late November / early December before dropping off to about 6.4 million for the week ended January 2.

Here’s that weekly breakdown, which averages to 42.8 million monthly visits in November and December:

The most popular Custom GPTs include those for creating images and videos, doing academic research, and writing code

Any Similarweb user with access to the Popular Pages tool can see a ranking of Custom GPTs by viewing the list for chat.openai.com and filtering on the “g/g” prefix custom GPTs use.

The listing below is based on Similarweb estimates of traffic over the last 28 days on record. Given that each represents a fraction of a percent of the traffic flowing to ChatGPT, the difference between being ranked second and being ranked 10th may not be significant.

The DALL-E integration GPT created by the makers of ChatGPT stands out with 6.5 million visits in the month of December.

One of the most popular independently produced Custom GPTs on the list, consensus.app attracted about 8,000 visits in December – but looks to be on track to get a million or more visits in January (over 500,000 in the first week of the month). The pitch for Consensus: “Your AI Research Assistant. Search 200M academic papers from Consensus, get science-based answers, and draft content with accurate citations.”

Canva’s Custom GPT, which is just getting off the ground, pulled in nearly 389,000 visits for the week ended Jan. 24. Kayak has a Custom GPT that was featured on the home page of OpenAI’s official directory, but seems to be too new for the traffic it’s generating to be captured in the Similarweb data model.

Another Custom GPT for academics and professional researchers, from the makers of myaidrive.com, says it can sift through thousands of documents in PDF format to extract information.

In addition to DALL-E, OpenAI offers several other add-ons created by the ChatGPT team for purposes like data analysis.

Others from independent creator notable leaders include Grimoire, from mindgoblinstudios.com, a coding assistant, Logo Creator by Chase Lean, Video GPT by VEED (veed.io), a prompt-based video creator, and an image generator that looks to be the work of an independent developer, which promises “A GPT specialized in generating and refining images with a mix of professional and friendly tone.”

Update: ChatGPT and rivals on the web

We continue to watch the progress of ChatGPT on the web – where it’s now in a pattern of ups and downs following its initial rocket ride into the top tier of websites – and as a mobile app.

One of the interesting rivalries has been between ChatGPT and Bing, which incorporates ChatGPT’s GPT-4 technology under the hood thanks to the close partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI. For most of the last year, ChatGPT has been attracting more visitors than Bing on a worldwide basis —

– although not if we narrow our focus to the US market.

ChatGPT traffic has dipped on a month-over-month basis in December, down -7.8% worldwide and -8.4% in the US. Bing was up 11.9% worldwide and 4% in the US. Character AI was up 9.9% worldwide and 12.7% in the US.

Update: ChatGPT rivals on mobile apps

ChatGPT introduced a mobile app in mid-2023, and it’s been growing ever since. Potentially, some web users have switched to using the mobile app more.

Monthly active users for the ChatGPT mobile apps for iOS and Android were up 13.1% from November to December, based on data for the US (where we have the best visibility into iOS app engagement). The Character AI chat app grew active users by 5.7%, while user engagement for the Microsoft Bing app (for both search and AI chat) dropped by 6.3%.

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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".