ChatGPT’s Growth Begins to Flatten, up 12.6% from March to April

Meanwhile, online education company Chegg became one of the first companies to say how much the generative AI trend is hurting its business

The exponential growth of ChatGPT seems to be subsiding, albeit at a stratospheric level where chat.openai.com gets more worldwide traffic than bing.com, nytimes.com, and cnn.com – although considered as a sort of search engine, it still only gets about 2% as much as google.com.

Meanwhile, the impact of ChatGPT in the education market has been significant enough that Chegg cited it as a reason for a first-quarter decline in its business selling online tutoring services. While we don’t see much change in the overall traffic to chegg.com, Similarweb tracking of converted visits for March 2023 showed a year-over-year drop of 89%.

Coming out of nowhere at the end of November 2022, ChatGPT had about 266 million visits by December – or about the same as Yahoo News, more than for the vast majority of websites –  and ended April 2023 with about 1.76 billion visits, according to preliminary Similarweb estimates. That’s incredible growth within a few short months, but the growth rate in April slowed – 12.6%, as opposed to month-over-month growth of 131.6% in January, 62.5% in February, and 55.8% in March.

In part, this may reflect ChatGPT owner OpenAI’s push to make its GPT-4 technology an “Intel inside” ingredient baked into other websites and digital services, including the Bing chatbot, via API access licensing deals. Originally intended as a tech demo website, chat.openai.com website only generates money for the company to the extent that people sign up for a ChatGPT Plus offering or use it as a jumping-off point for exploring the APIs.

Still, ChatGPT itself is so far attracting a greater volume of traffic from the explosion of interest in generative AI than any of those other services leveraging the technology.

Key takeaways

• In April, ChatGPT attracted about 1.76 billion visits worldwide, up 12.6% from March.
• Within the U.S., ChatGPT’s traffic is not quite as intense – 187.6 million visits in April, up 17.5% month-over-month.
• ChatGPT versus Chegg is a story of students finding another way of getting quick and often detailed answers to their questions or starting points for essays. For March 2023, converted visits to chegg.com – visits that translated into a purchase – dropped 89% year-over-year. The site’s conversion rate dropped to 0.04%, compared with 0.36% in March 2022. In January, which is typically a peak month because of start-of-semester activity, converted visits were down 60% year-over-year.
• The story about ChatGPT overtaking Bing doesn’t apply within the U.S., where Bing attracts about twice as much traffic (377.8 million visits in April). However, despite the interest Bing has generated by incorporating ChatGPT features, traffic to bing.com dropped 5% between March and April, according to preliminary Similarweb estimates. Worldwide traffic to bing.com dropped 9.7% to 1.3 billion visits.

ChatGPT growth flattens slightly

After rising extremely rapidly, the growth in traffic to the ChatGPT site is starting to level off …

… although looked at from a broader perspective, next to some comparable websites, it still looks like a rocket that came out of nowhere.

Still small on the scale of Google

ChatGPT and the explosion of interest in generative AI have shaken up the search engine market – but only enough for ChatGPT to join the second-tier rank of search and information discovery services that are dwarfed by Google.

Here’s what the comparison looks like if we take Google out of the picture.

In the U.S., the picture is different with ChatGPT playing a significant role but at about half the traffic volume of DuckDuckGo and Bing.

Growing rapidly, but not eating the whole digital world

ChatGPT’s growth is still impressive – just no longer so fast that it looks like it will eat the whole web. Whether it could eat whole businesses, like Chegg’s, is another story.

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Report By: David F. Carr, Senior Insights Manager

Methodology

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Image: “robot runner” from the Bing image generator

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".