‘How Do I Make Money with ChatGPT?’ Popular on Search

Some ChatGPT enthusiasts believe it will make internet search as we know it obsolete, but meanwhile, the AI chatbot is driving an explosion of activity on conventional search engines. Finding ways of profiting off the bot’s capabilities is a particularly hot topic.

The volume of searches related to ChatGPT exploded in December (following the late November launch of the service) and grew another 75% in January.

The two biggest search topics (beyond general searches for information about ChatGPT) that jumped out at us are for how-to/tutorial (more than 150,000 searches in January) and specifically “how to make money with chatgpt,” which we’ve grouped together with “chatgpt business opportunities.” Searches for money-making possibilities totaled about 114,000 searches in January.

Top “Make Money” Search Hits

Here are some of the domains attracting the most traffic from the “how to make money” topic, with sample URLs for articles capturing that search traffic.

Top “How To” Searches

ChatGPT and jobs

Despite the speculation that ChatGPT could undermine some professions, we don’t see a large volume of searches related to “will ChatGPT steal my job” – no more than “ChatGPT job opportunities” and “use ChatGPT to look for a job”. These are all below the 5,000 per month limit we often use as a cutoff for statistically valid info.

It does look like there was a surge of interest in the “will chatgpt steal my job” topic in December, but it seems to have receded.

Update on the ChatGPT traffic trend

Since we last published an update saying ChatGPT was attracting about 25 million daily visits, it’s climbed to north of 30 million visits – 37 million on February 13, according to our estimates.

Where the traffic is coming from

ChatGPT gets about 65% of its traffic direct (people typing in the address or following a bookmark), 23% from referrals, 6.6% from organic search, and 3.4% from social media. There’s no significant paid search or display advertising traffic.

Within social media referrals, YouTube is the biggest traffic generator (57%).

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Methodology

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Image: “a robot printing money, digital art” by DALL-E

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".