ChatGPT Traffic Stumbles, Luma Dream Machine Surges

ChatGPT’s growth in worldwide traffic stalled in July, but did not dip nearly as much as in summer of 2023. US traffic continued to rise.

ChatGPT may not have escaped the summer doldrums entirely, but the traffic dip it saw in July came nowhere near repeating the summer slump of 2023. The dip also can’t be blamed on vacationing North American school children not needing the app to cheat on their homework, which was the semi-joking explanation of the months-long traffic dip the ChatGPT website experienced in summer 2023.

Meanwhile, Claude was the ChatGPT rival that made the biggest percentage traffic gain in July, while the Luma Dream Machine video generator vaulted into the top tier of AI websites.

Key takeaways

• Between June and July, month-over-month (MoM) traffic to chatgpt.com dipped slightly (-0.4%) worldwide, according to Similarweb estimates. However, US web traffic to the site was up 4.8%. Year-over-year (YoY), traffic was up 66.2% worldwide and 57.9% in the US.
• Monthly active users of the ChatGPT mobile apps rose 4% MoM, based on combined iOS and Android estimates for the US.
• Worldwide traffic to Claude.ai was up 64.9% MoM and 440% YoY.
• Web traffic for Character AI (character.ai) rose 1.9% MoM worldwide but dipped -2.1% in the US. However, US app usage for Character AI was up 11.1% MoM. This playful AI chatbot started as a website, but has been encouraging a migration of its users to the app.
• Traffic to the website of the Luma Dream Machine video generator (lumalabs.ai) rose 33.4% between June and July. Worldwide traffic to the lumalabs.ai website reached 22.6M visits, up from about 1 million a few months ago, when the website was advertising opportunities to get on a waitlist, leapfrogging products that have been on the market longer such as veed.io (12.1M visits) and synthesia.io (2.4M).
• Traffic to Google’s Gemini (gemini.google.com) was down -14.3% MoM and the standalone version of Microsoft CoPilot (copilot.microsoft.com) was down -13.4% MoM. In both cases, these ChatGPT rivals represent only a fraction of Google and Microsoft’s AI initiatives, which they are embedding in their search engines and other products

ChatGPT’s incremental dip

ChatGPT website traffic has been rising steadily for the past several months, erasing the traffic losses it was slow to recover from after the summer slump of 2023. The chart below has been adjusted to include both the old chatopenai.com domain and new chatgpt.com domain of the service.

This sampling of the websites most associated with the rise of AI chatbots shows OpenAI’s ChatGPT towering over all the rest. The Gemini and CoPilot numbers under-value the broader investments Google and Microsoft are making in AI, but they represent the most direct comparisons to ChatGPT.

Luma leaps ahead among AI video generators

ChatGPT creator OpenAI created tremendous buzz around previews of its Sora video generator a few months ago, but the product is not yet widely available. Meanwhile, Luma Dream Machine has entered the market as a similar tool available to use for free (albeit with upgrades available, and free users are subject to more of a delay in queuing video generation projects).

The quality of what the tool can generate from a text prompt and/or input based on images or sample videos has attracted attention, including a series of favorable Tom’s Guide articles. Worldwide traffic reached 22.6M visits in July.

For the moment, at least, that puts Luma Dream Machine ahead of many comparable web apps for AI video generation.

Here’s a sample of Luma Dream machine output based on the prompt, “Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving With a Pict” (the title of an early Pink Floyd song). The picts were an ancient people of Scotland known for painting themselves blue, which somewhat explains the blue warrior rabbit.

Is AI a product or a feature?

In this report, we’ve mostly focused on standalone websites offering generative AI tools, but we know that’s not the full story. In addition to offering Gemini and CoPilot, Google and Microsoft are incorporating generative AI into search results, productivity suites, and new products. Standalone AI image and video generation products compete with video and image editing suites that incorporate AI.

That said, these specialist websites are a source of innovation, and tracking them gives us a way of spotting the overall trends – which, in general, are continuing upward. In aggregate, across more than 100 AI app domains tracked, traffic is up more than 75% YoY.

The Similarweb Insights & Communications team is available to pull additional or updated data on request for the news media (journalists are invited to write to press@similarweb.com). When citing our data, please reference Similarweb as the source and link back to the most relevant blog post or similarweb.com/blog/insights/.

Methodology

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Image: ChatGPT/DALL-E image from the prompt “A wide angle cartoon style scene of a robot experiencing a minor stumble but quickly recovering.”

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".