ChatGPT Topped 3 Billion Visits in September

After the extreme peak and summer slump of 2023, ChatGPT has been setting new traffic highs since May

ChatGPT has been topping its web traffic records for months now, with September 2024 traffic up 112% year-over-year (YoY) to 3.1 billion visits, according to Similarweb estimates. That’s a change from last year, when traffic to the site went through a boom-and-bust cycle.

From its launch in November 2022, the website rapidly grew into one of the world’s top digital properties. But after hitting a 2023 peak of 1.9 billion worldwide visits in the Spring, traffic slumped throughout the summer before beginning to recover in September 2023. Traffic didn’t top 2023 levels until May 2024, but since then it has climbed every month to 3.1 billion visits in September 2024.

That makes ChatGPT (chatgpt.com) the #11 website by worldwide traffic – not in the same league as google.com (82 billion visits) or youtube.com (28 billion), but ahead of amazon.com (2.6 billion, although that doesn’t count Amazon’s international domains).

ChatGPT blew past Microsoft’s Bing (bing.com) for worldwide traffic last year, but September was the first month when it surpassed traffic to bing.com in the US.

Key takeaways 

• September worldwide traffic to chatgpt.com was up 112% YoY and 18.7% month-over-month (MoM). The YoY comparison is between chatgpt.com and the chat.openai.com subdomain that was the service’s original home.
• Combined iOS and Android monthly active users (MAUs) for the ChatGPT app were up 109% YoY in the US and 200.7% in the UK. Based on Android, worldwide usage of the app was up 249% YoY.
• Web traffic to chatgpt.com was up 79.7% YoY in the US and 116% in the UK. The gain in the US was enough to put chatgpt.com, with 442.9 million visits, ahead of bing.com, with 404.3 million. 

No summer slump in 2024

ChatGPT switched to the chatgpt.com domain at about the same time that it announced a flurry of product enhancements, and traffic has been climbing ever since.

In 2023, the summer slump led to the suspicion that ChatGPT traffic was depending on students who used the tool for homework help and not as much during summer vacation. Whether or not that was true, ChatGPT seems to have secured a more loyal audience now.

Although we use Bing as a point of comparison, it’s not a direct competitor of ChatGPT, and Microsoft is a close partner of ChatGPT owner OpenAI. On the other hand, Microsoft has tried to reposition its search engine as more of an AI app over time, in addition to promoting a family of Copilot offerings based partly on OpenAI software.

The standings among ChatGPT competitors, including Bing, look like this on a worldwide basis.

The app came later but has grown steadily

ChatGPT didn’t have a mobile app when it first launched but added one last year. The app version has also been gaining voice and image recognition capabilities that make it important to ChatGPT’s future and desirable for its most enthusiastic users.

At the same time that ChatGPT is pulling ahead of Bing in web traffic, it is catching up with the Bing app with mobile users in the US.

In the UK, ChatGPT is ahead of all others by app usage.

Worldwide, ChatGPT’s standout growth is even more obvious, based on Android user estimates.

ChatGPT in perspective

ChatGPT’s traffic makes it a heavyweight compared with the vast majority of the websites on the web, but it’s not yet a threat to Google as the primary way internet users search for information. Some of its growth this year likely comes from making more features available in the free version of ChatGPT, but it’s not in the same class as the largest mass-market and ad-supported websites.

Here’s a longer list of top websites to let you see where ChatGPT fits in, based on their traffic for September 2024.

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Image: ChatGPT/DALL-E illustration of robot cheerleaders in a pyramid formation

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".