ChatGPT Traffic up 13% YoY, Nearly Matching 2023 Peak

US traffic up 33% from 2023 peak; Custom GPTs attracted 56.5 million visits in March.

ChatGPT is on track to match and surpass its peak traffic record of 1.81 billion visits worldwide, set in May 2023, according to Similarweb estimates. March 2024 traffic to chat.openai.com reached 1.77 billion visits. Worldwide traffic dipped in the summer of 2023 and has been slowly climbing back ever since.

In the US, ChatGPT traffic recovered matched 2023 levels back in October (although it’s seen ups and downs since then) and is now up 33% year-over-year (YoY).

Growth for third-party Custom GPTs

ChatGPT owner OpenAI introduced an app store with its Custom GPTs in the fall of 2023. That segment of web traffic is up to 56.5 million visits as of March. Third-party GPTs, excluding those developed by OpenAI itself, reached 50.5 million visits in March, a 3% increase from February’s traffic and a 68% increase from November.

ChatGPT remains the largest…

ChatGPT is the largest of the AI chat platforms, at least those operated as separate platforms.

We’ve omitted Microsoft’s entries from these charts because Microsoft is incorporating AI (including tech licensed from OpenAI) in many different ways, including the Bing search engine, a CoPilot portal, and CoPilot integrations with many different products. Google’s story is also getting more complicated – although it offers a separate portal for Gemini (which replaced Bard) at gemini.google.com, it’s also beginning to integrate AI chat with its main search results.

… but other AI Chat platforms are growing faster

Month-over-month (MoM), ChatGPT’s worldwide traffic of 13% growth was proportionately less than for some of its competitors, particularly Anthropic’s Claude (claude.ai), up 161% (albeit from a much smaller base). The increase reflects March’s release of the Claude 3 edition of Anthropic’s large language model, which by some accounts leapfrogs OpenAI’s GPT 4.

Google Gemini traffic was up 37% MoM to 433.5 million visits worldwide in March, compared with ChatGPT’s 1.77 billion. In March 2023, when Google launched its AI chat product as Bard, the platform drew just 30.6 million visits.

ChatGPT’s rival Character AI (character.ai) saw traffic growth of 19% MoM and 99% YoY, with 213 million visits in March.

Meanwhile, AI-powered search engine Perplexity (perplexity.ai) boosted traffic 24% MoM and 288% YoY to 61.5 million visits.

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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".