ChatGPT Continued to Gain Traffic in June, Beating the “Summer Slump”

New features, GPT-4o AI model have reignited interest in OpenAI’s chatbot

ChatGPT will set a new traffic record in June, with 2.9 billion visits to chatgpt.com, a 15.6% increase over the previous peak of 2.5 billion visits in May 2024, according to Similarweb estimates. The June figure is a preliminary estimate – a projection based on data through June 24 – but clearly OpenAI’s chatbot is not repeating the summer slump of 2023, at least not yet.

In May, ChatGPT switched from chat.openai.com to chatgpt.com as the primary address for the service, but for this analysis, we’re treating them as the same website.

Last year, worldwide traffic peaked at 1.8 billion visits in May 2023 – but fell in June and throughout the summer. That led to the joke (or was it a joke?) that students on summer vacation had less need of ChatGPT to write their essays. Traffic didn’t recover in the fall and didn’t surpass 2023 levels until May 2024.

In part, ChatGPT may be benefiting from structural changes, including the switch from an openai.com subdomain to its own chatgpt.com domain. The domain switch happened in May 2024, but traffic was already trending upward before that. OpenAI has also consolidated of services like the DALL-E image generator under the ChatGPT umbrella.

Key takeaways 

• June traffic for ChatGPT will be up about 96% year-over-year (YoY), comparing chatgpt.com with the website’s previous home at chat.openai.com, according to a preliminary estimate from Similarweb. In the US, the increase is 135.8% YoY and 5.55% month-over-month (MoM).
• Daily active users of the ChatGPT mobile app are also up about 13% MoM in June to 3.2 million, based on estimates for the US. Active users have been trending higher all year. Many of the new features in OpenAI’s GPT-4o algorithm related to voice and video input are coming to the app first, which will be likely to drive further increases in mobile app engagement.
• Traffic to Google’s Gemini has also been trending higher – up nearly 150% YoY in June, despite a -16.6% MoM drop from May to June. As with ChatGPT, we’re comparing two different web representing the same service. Formerly known as Bard (bard.google.com), Google’s AI chatbot was renamed Gemini (gemini.google.com).
• CharacterAI, a more game-like AI chatbot, saw a global web traffic gain of 62% YoY and 11.5% MoM to character.ai, even though it has been encouraging users to switch to its mobile app. App usage was up about 15% MoM in June, based on daily active users in the US.

ChatGPT continues to reach new heights

ChatGPT remains the traffic champion in generative AI, at least as a standalone feature. This chart shows its rise compared with its most direct competitors. Google and Microsoft also embed AI capabilities in many other products, including search and their respective office suites, making it harder to track the total impact.

Among ChatGPT rivals, Gemini’s growth faltered in June while Character AI continued to rise

The blue line representing Gemini on the chart below may be slightly distorted by the switch from the bard.google.com subdomain to gemini.google.com, which happened in February 2024. The February 2024 data point shown is for the Gemini-branded subdomain. Despite some ups and downs, Google’s AI service attracted about 150% more web traffic in June, YoY.

CharacterAI’s traffic dipped at around the time it introduced its mobile app last year– around September, prompting some web users (particularly mobile web browser users) to convert to using the app. Yet web traffic has been climbing steadily in recent months, setting an expected new high of 309 million visits in June.

Meanwhile, the Character AI mobile app is approaching 2 million daily active users in the US alone, compared with 3.2 million for ChatGPT, iOS and Android combined.

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.

Contact: For more information, please write to press@similarweb.com.

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".