ChatGPT Enjoyed 28% Organic Search Traffic and 11.7 Million Social Visits in Past 28 Days

ChatGPT parent company OpenAI is seeing rapid traffic growth, 92% of which is powered by its celebrated chatbot that can answer any question (sometimes correctly) and write essays or code snippets. That growth was powered by 82.9 million searches in January and 11.7 million social visits over the past 28 days.

The chat.openai.com subdomain for the app topped 25 million daily visits last week and has been adding about 519,000 visits per day on average.

That makes openai.com the #44 site on the web, overall, according to Similarweb’s rankings for January.

Key takeaways

• Searches for ChatGPT and related terms topped 82.9 million in January, according to Similarweb estimates.
• Over the last 28 days, 28% of the traffic to openai.com came from organic search, and 3.4% came from social media.
• Of the social referrals, 56.7% were from YouTube, 12.4% from WhatsApp, 10% from Facebook, and 6.9% from Twitter.

Where ChatGPT gets its traffic

While almost 65.6% of traffic to openai.com comes directly to the website, reflecting strong brand awareness and repeat visits, another 28% comes from organic search – people wanting to know where to find the app they’ve heard so much about. These estimates are based on desktop web traffic.

Show, don’t tell: YouTube dominates social traffic

The portion of traffic coming from social referrals reflects all those people sharing something cool they got ChatGPT to do on their behalf. YouTube accounts for the lion’s share of that traffic as a result of all those YouTubers creating tutorials on what ChatGPT can do and how to get it to do your bidding.

ChatGPT fans from around the world

Only 11% of the traffic to openai.com is coming from within the U.S., which lags slightly behind India as the greatest traffic generator, accounting for 11.4% of visits.

The rest of the traffic originates from 173 other countries around the world.

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Methodology

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Image: “robot YouTube star, digital art” by OpenAI’s Dall-E 2

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".