ChatGPT on Track for 2 Billion Visits in May, After Topping 100 Million Daily Visits Twice Last Week

New features and expanded free access seem to have broken the slump that followed the previous high of 1.8 billion visits in May 2023

ChatGPT has been setting daily traffic records since the beginning of the month. The site received 83.5 million visits on May 7, following the transition to the chatgpt.com domain; 96.3 million on May 13 following a series of announcements from parent company OpenAI; and more than 100 million on the following  two days, according to Similarweb estimates. By Friday May 17, traffic had dipped to 88.5 million – still significantly higher than for any day before May.

Update: on Monday May 20 it topped million visits again, putting the average for the month at over 77.7 million daily visits.

At that rate, ChatGPT will record well over 2 billion visits in May, beating its previous peak of 1.8 billion in May 2023. The web version of ChatGPT has been slowly rebuilding worldwide traffic ever since the summer slump of 2023.

Key takeaways

• For the first 20 days of May, traffic averaged 77.7 million daily visits. If it continues at that rate for the 31 days of May, the monthly total would be 2.3 billion visits. Even if traffic slows in the last weeks of the month, a total of more than 2 billion visits seems likely.
• In the seven days leading up to May 17, web traffic for chatgpt.com was up 27.7% versus the previous week, and traffic to the openai.com corporate domain was up 25%. Over that same period, the daily active user count for the ChatGPT mobile app was up 11.5%, based on combined iOS and Android users in the US.

These numbers have been adjusted to account for the transition from chat.openai.com to chatgpt.com as the home for OpenAI’s chatbot.

The latest peak in context

Following its launch in late 2022, traffic to the ChatGPT website grew rapidly until it was one of the most popular in the world. After many ups and downs, it is now setting new records with over 100 million daily visits on two days last week.

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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".