ChatGPT remains the largest AI chat platform, but is growing more slowly. Anthropic's Claude is currently growing the fastest, thanks to the release of Claude 3 in March.
In March 2024, ChatGPT approached its record of 1.81 billion worldwide visits from May 2023, reaching 1.77 billion visits, according to Similarweb estimates.
After peaking in summer 2023, ChatGPT's global traffic declined and has only slowly increased since then. US traffic in March 2024 was 33% higher year-over-year, as the first three months of 2023 still saw strong growth.
Overall, the rapid growth ChatGPT experienced between November 2022 and May 2023 does not seem to continue, which might be why OpenAI is increasingly focusing on enterprise AI.
New features such as individualized chatbots (Custom GPTs) or the image AI DALL-E have not been able to trigger much growth. In March, custom GPTs had 56.5 million visits.
Without the GPTs developed by OpenAI, including DALL-E, there were 50.5 million visits, 3% more than in February and 68% more than in November. After the plugins, GPTs could be OpenAI's next mainstream project to fail.
ChatGPT's global growth of 13% month-on-month is lower than some competitors, notably Anthropic's Claude, which saw a 161% increase in March, albeit from a much smaller base. However, Claude is only accessible in Europe via API, not the web interface, so there is still considerable growth potential.
The increase reflects the release of Claude 3 in March, which by some estimates outperforms OpenAI's GPT-4. Google Gemini saw a 37% month-over-month increase to 433.5 million visits in March, still well below ChatGPT's 1.77 billion. However, when Google launched its AI chat product Bard in March 2023, it only reached 30.6 million visits, so that's something.
Character AI grew 19% month-over-month and 99% year-over-year in March, reaching 213 million visits. Perplexity, the AI-powered search engine, grew 24% month-over-month and 288% year-over-year to 61.5 million visits.
Website visits only account for a portion of the growth, as all the providers besides Character.AI also sell their models via APIs and some offer smartphone apps.
ChatGPT's lead remains massive
Despite stagnating growth rates, ChatGPT remains by far the leading AI chat platform. Microsoft and Google's integrated offerings are an exception. Microsoft integrates AI capabilities, such as the technology licensed from OpenAI, in a variety of ways, including the Bing search engine, the CoPilot portal, and numerous products. According to Similarweb, this makes the measurement too confusing, so the numbers were excluded from the statistics.
Google is also becoming less transparent: in addition to the separate portal for Gemini (gemini.google.com), the successor to Bard, the company is beginning to integrate AI chat into regular search results. Gemini is even integrated into the SMS successor for Android. As with Microsoft, the numbers for the standalone Gemini platform are of limited significance, but they are an indicator of the platform's development.
Among the standalone platforms, ChatGPT is still number one, while Anthropic is catching up with Claude but has only achieved a fraction of OpenAI's reach so far. However, Claude's rapid growth after version 3 shows how quickly things can change with a convincing new product.
The moat for model manufacturers seems to be shrinking, also considering progress in open-source development. OpenAI is already under pressure with GPT-5 if it wants to trigger another significant growth spurt and confirm its high valuation.