Traffic to the ChatGPT website is stagnating at the level of mid-2023. Compared to the previous year, the growth figures are still strong.
ChatGPT's initial growth explosion seems to have peaked for now. According to the web analytics company Similarweb, with 1.6 billion visits worldwide in February this year, the platform is lagging behind its peak of 1.8 billion visits in May 2023.
On a monthly and yearly basis, however, it's still growing: Similarweb saw 208.8 million visits in the U.S. in February, up 87 percent year-over-year and 15 percent month-over-month.
Internationally, growth was one percent month-over-month and 62 percent year-over-year. In February 2023, the ChatGPT hype was just beginning.
The numbers show that ChatGPT's meteoric rise from November 2022 to May 2023 has recently come to a halt. The platform has stagnated, and OpenAI has been unable to spark a new wave of growth despite offering incentives such as new models, image generation, custom chatbots, and team accounts.
Custom GPTs, which in combination with a GPT store have already been described by some as the "App Store" moment of the AI wave, have not had much of an impact either. According to Similarweb, GPTs generated about ten million visits in the US in February.
ChatGPT leaves Google Gemini in the dust
Still, these are numbers Google would love to see. The website of Google's ChatGPT competitor Gemini Advanced attracted 51.7 million unique visitors in February, more than its predecessor Bard ever managed, according to Similarweb, but still only a fraction of ChatGPT's traffic.
Other generative AI platforms, such as Microsoft's Copilot, AI search engine Perplexity, and Anthropic's Claude, have received much industry acclaim and attention. However, traffic numbers indicate that this internal excitement has not yet translated to the public.
Keep in mind that websites are only part of the growth story. All the companies mentioned also sell their models via APIs, and some offer apps for smartphones.
But app growth is modest, according to Similarweb. Microsoft's Bing app, which uses OpenAI's chatbot technology, grew 20 percent year-over-year, but lost 8.6 percent month-over-month. Chatbots as a search engine replacement remain a pipe dream for Microsoft for now. The ChatGPT app, which wasn't available in February 2023, grew five percent month-over-month.
