Rapid Growth Continues for ChatGPT, Google’s NotebookLM

ChatGPT traffic is up over 100% year-over-year. NotebookLM is up over 200% month-over-month.

ChatGPT completed another month of double-digit traffic growth, up 17.2% month-over-month (MoM) to 3.7 billion worldwide visits, according to preliminary Similarweb estimates for October. That’s a 115.9% year-over-year (YoY) increase (comparing chatgpt.com to the service’s former chat.openai.com address).

Meanwhile, one of Google’s most interesting new AI applications, NotebookLM grew its traffic more than 200% in October to 31.5 million visits, its second month of triple-digit growth. A year ago, when the application debuted, it was averaging a few hundred thousand visits per month.

Key takeaways

• ChatGPT remains on a strong upward growth trend, up 8% MoM in August, 18.7% in September, and now 17% in October.
• A few smaller rivals grew faster, but on a smaller scale in October.
  • Microsoft’s stand-alone website for CoPilot, one of several ways Microsoft brings AI capabilities to market, experienced traffic growth of 87.6% MoM to 69.4 million visits. Microsoft recently began redirecting Bing chat interactions to the CoPilot site, which accounts for some of that increase.
  • Perplexity was up 25.5% MoM and 199.2% YoY to 90.8 million visits, while Claude was up 25.5% MoM and 394.9% YoY to 84.1 million visits.
• Google’s Gemini website attracted 291.6 million visits in October, up 6.2% MoM and 19% YoY (compared with the former bard.google.com address).
• NotebookLM, another application of Google’s Gemini AI technologies, is about a tenth the size of gemini.google.com by traffic volume and about a third the size of Perplexity.

Click on any of the website links for more Similarweb data about that site.

Strong upward trajectory for ChatGPT

ChatGPT experienced phenomenal growth from its launch in November 2022 to becoming one of the largest websites in the world by early 2023. Its recent growth chart is following almost as steep of a trajectory on a much larger base. Although growth faltered for a while starting in mid-2023, ChatGPT is now solidifying its position as the leading pure play brand in generative AI, now operating at its own domain rather than as a subdomain of its parent company, OpenAI.

After setting a new traffic record of 2.2 billion visits in May 2024, ChatGPT kept climbing, to 3.7 billion visits in October.

Over the last few months, OpenAI has upgraded its core algorithm, added new features to OpenAI, and consolidated other applications like the DALL-E image generator as apps (“GPTs”) accessed from within ChatGPT. Just last week, OpenAI added a search engine as another embedded ChatGPT experience.

OpenAI has also been innovating with the mobile app version of the service. While we don’t yet have monthly estimates for app usage, daily active users in the US were up 19% MoM and 258.3% in October.

NotebookLM reimagines the user interface for generative AI

NotebookLM was introduced in July 2023 and built its audience gradually for many months before seeing traffic explode in September and October of 2023. Working somewhat like an AI-enhanced version of a note-taking app, NotebookLM allows users to collect notes, documents, website links, videos, and other content, which they can then query using AI prompts. In other words, rather than chatting with knowledge collected from across the internet, you can AI chat with your own curated knowledge base of sources you trust.

That capability made NotebookLM interesting to students and researchers, but what really caught users’ imagination was the ability for NotebookLM to generate podcast-style AI summaries of any data set. Even if the user has no intention of publishing the generated audio as a podcast, it can be a handy way of consuming to a digested summary of any collection of documents.

The result: nearly 300% MoM growth in September and 201% in October.

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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".