ChatGPT Topped 1 Billion Visits in February

The already enormous traffic to the AI chatbot increased by 62.5%

ChatGPT, the AI chatbot from OpenAI, reached a round-number milestone in February, topping 1 billion visits to its website, chat.openai.com.

Key takeaways 

• The chat.openai.com website attracted more than 1 billion visits in February, up 62.5% from 616 million in January, according to Similarweb estimates. The site launched at the end of November, attracting about 153,000 visits in the last few days of that month and 266 million visits in December.
• The site attracts about as many visitors as the Bing search engine – actually more if we exclude subdomains of bing.com. The main bing.com domain attracted 831 million visits worldwide in February. Bing is piloting embedded ChatGPT capabilities, but only for an audience of beta testers.
• ChatGPT is sometimes framed as a threat not just to Bing but to Google – even though it’s not exactly a search engine – but ChatGPT’s 1 billion visits compares with 68 billion for the main google.com domain alone (not including subdomains like maps.google.com).

The growth of ChatGPT

From a standing start in November, ChatGPT topped 1 billion visits in February from 153 million unique visitors. The average amount of time visitors spent on the site also rose to 8.4 minutes in February, compared with 7.4 minutes in January.

ChatGPT surpasses Bing

In comparison with bing.com (excluding subdomains), ChatGPT has been attracting more daily visits than Bing since early February.

Still small on the scale of Google

ChatGPT’s growth is dramatic enough to get Google’s attention, but it has a long way to go to match the Google search engine – which isn’t necessarily OpenAI’s goal for the AI chatbot anyway. So far at least, OpenAI is more interested in licensing the technology as an API that can be plugged into other apps and websites, including Bing.

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Report By: David F. Carr, Senior Insights Manager

Methodology

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Image: “1 billion bots, 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".