Insights
ChatGPT Hits Daily Traffic Record as Search Engine Rumors Swirl
As traffic hit a new record of 83.5 million daily visits on May 7 as OpenAI prepared for a big announcement.
According to reports in Reuters and The Verge, ChatGPT owner OpenAI is preparing to launch a search engine to challenge Google next week, ahead of Google’s I/O conference.
The move comes after a roller coaster year in which worldwide traffic to chat.openai.com peaked at 1.8 billion visits in May 2023, dipped over the summer, but recovered in April 2024, according to Similarweb estimates. Daily traffic to the new chatgpt.com domain set a new record for the service at 83.5 million visits on May 7. Several of the prior peak days occurred in April.
Update: Following the search-related news reports, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tweeted confirming a big announcement Monday 10 AM PT but saying “not gpt-5, not a search engine, but we’ve been hard at work on some new stuff we think people will love! feels like magic to me.” Search Engine Journal suggested OpenAI may, however, incorporate more real-time information into ChatGPT, making AI chat more competitive with search. Another thing to watch for is the introduction of a multi-modal digital assistant capable of understanding mixed text, image, and audio input.
Whether ChatGPT could succeed as a mass-market search engine is questionable – its traffic is still only about 2% of Google’s. If the rumors are true, OpenAI will likely partner with Microsoft, a major investor in the company, and incorporate Bing search engine tech. OpenAI may not be equipped to function as the operator of an ad-supported mass-market search engine on its own, although it has been growing its subscription and technology licensing businesses.
Microsoft already incorporates the GPT-4 generative AI algorithms behind ChatGPT into Bing (bing.com), but a ChatGPT-branded search engine would give OpenAI a chance to put its own spin on how AI chat interactions can improve search. A well-funded search startup, Perplexity (perplexity.ai), also uses GPT-4 behind the scenes. The differences between these services are more at the user interface level, in how they combine chat, search, and search results with generative AI content.
Meanwhile, Google is busily incorporating its Gemini AI technology into search and other products, including the gemini.google.com portal.
Key takeaways
- ChatGPT attracted 1.8 billion visits in April, putting it right around its May 2023 peak of 1.81 billion visits, according to Similarweb estimates. Traffic was up about 2%, both year-over-year (YoY) and month-over-month (MoM).
- ChatGPT attracts more traffic than Microsoft’s Bing, with 1.5 billion visits, and far more than Perplexity, with 70.5 million visits. Even excluding subdomains for Gmail, Google Maps, and other services beyond search, Google received 70.8 billion visits in April.
- At the beginning of May, OpenAI began redirecting ChatGPT traffic from chat.openai.com to chatgpt.com, potentially as part of its move to solidify the ChatGPT brand and introduce other products around it, including search.
The ChatGPT roller coaster
Below is the journey ChatGPT has been on since its launch at the end of November 2022, in comparison with Bing and Perplexity.
However, if we add Google to the chart, ChatGPT’s impressive rise fades into the background – as does the challenge posed by Bing.
ChatGPT gets a new home on the web – and sets a daily traffic record
At the end of May, OpenAI began redirecting ChatGPT website visits to chatgpt.com, rather than the chat.openai.com subdomain the service had used since its inception. Although it’s too early to say what the long-term effect of this change will be, within the first few days, daily traffic peaked to the highest level we’ve seen to date – 83.5 million visits.
Several of April’s traffic peaks also set daily records, in the range of 67 to 70 million visits in the middle of the month.
Still the biggest name in AI chat
ChatGPT remains far larger than its direct competitors in AI chat. Google Gemini is significantly smaller by traffic volume, as are others like Character AI.
The ChatGPT audience gives OpenAI an opportunity to do something interesting with AI-enhanced search. We’re curious to see what that will be.
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Image: “Robot looking through binoculars” from CoPilot Designer.
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