Perplexity.AI Gained Traffic as ChatGPT Dipped in June and July

As OpenAI’s ChatGPT saw traffic drop in June and July, Perplexity.ai was up 9.6% and 11.2% each month. Google’s Bard stalled in June but was up 34.5% in July.

After months of looking unstoppable, the steady rise of traffic to the ChatGPT website turned into falling traffic in June and July. In June, another fast-growing AI chat product, Character.AI, dipped along with ChatGPT, while traffic to Google’s Bard also dropped slightly. However, Perplexity.AI’s AI chat-powered search website continued a pattern of steady gains.

Perplexity.AI is actually powered by the same technology as ChatGPT, leveraging OpenAI application programming interfaces via the Microsoft Azure cloud service. It competes with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft Bing Chat, which also implements OpenAI’s GPT algorithms, offering its own take on a search user experience delivered on top of that foundation. Perplexity.AI has worked on mitigating some of the problems with generative AI, for example by providing footnotes that link back to verifiable sources of the data it is presenting and a system for filtering out “hallucination” effects where AI engines have been known to bluff their way through answers with made up facts.

Perplexity.AI’s approach appears to be winning fans, defying the “school’s out” explanation of why AI chat’s popularity might fall with the start of summer. Perhaps it’s insulated from that trend by appealing to professional researchers willing to pay for its Pro version.

Key takeaways

• Traffic to Perplexity.AI was up 9.6% in June, when ChatGPT (chat.openai.com) was down 9.7%, according to Similarweb estimates. In July, Perplexity.AI was up another 11.2% and ChatGPT was down 9.6%.
• Google’s Bard (bard.google.com) fell slightly in June, down 1.4%, but came roaring back in July with a 34.5% month-over-month increase.
• Character.ai, which takes a playful approach, saw traffic drop 32.4% in June but bounced back in July with an 8.3% increase.
• Perplexity.AI and Character.AI have both seen a traffic boom following the interest generated by the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022. From January to July traffic to Character.AI increased by more than 200%, and traffic to Perplexity.AI increased by more than 300%.

Up when ChatGPT was down

For most of 2023, Perplexity.AI was seeing its traffic grow more or less in sync with the growth of ChatGPT, but over the past few months, it’s been growing faster.

Though fast-growing, Perplexity.AI is a relatively small player in AI chat

Meanwhile, ChatGPT is still by far the largest stand-alone AI chat project.

Bing is on the upswing

Incorporating AI chat into Bing may also be part of the story of the growth of Microsoft’s search engine, although it’s hard to separate out just how big that effect has been. Traffic to Bing.com was up a fraction of a percentage point in July and has had its ups and downs over the past few months. The year-over-year statistics are more impressive, up 12.8% in June and 5.6% in July on a much larger base than most of the websites we’re talking about.

However, Bing continues to lag far behind Google and even a little behind ChatGPT, which attracted about 1.5 billion worldwide visitors to its website in July compared with 946.6 million for Bing. Google drew 72.7 billion visitors to the main google.com domain (for purposes of this comparison, we’ve filtered out subdomains like Gmail’s mail.google.com).

Reinventing search

Fast Company called Perplexity.ai one of the companies with the potential to show us the future of search. Microsoft and Google have their own theories about how using an AI chat assistant might simplify the exploration and synthesis of all the knowledge on the web – and how their business models will have to adapt if they prove to be the ones to make it happen. Meanwhile, OpenAI is selling access to its platform to buyers including Microsoft and Perplexity, even while enhancing its own ChatGPT product. Character.AI has its own playful take on the potential of the technology.

How it will all shake out is a question no chatbot can answer. Or rather, it might come up with an answer, but would you trust it? Or would you be perplexed?

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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".