After OpenAI announced GPT-4o and the related improvements to the free ChatGPT, the platform is gaining more users again. However, the exponential growth seen after its launch in November 2022 is over.
Based on estimates from Similarweb, ChatGPT is expected to have more than 2 billion visitors in May. The site recorded beyond 100 million visitors in a single day twice in the past week. New features and expanded free access seem to have overcome the stagnation the web platform has been experiencing since May 2023.
It remains to be seen if ChatGPT will be able to maintain this level - the summer holidays are just around the corner and many users probably just wanted to try out the new audio version of ChatGPT. Although it has been demoed, it won't be widely available for a few more months.
Nevertheless, the ChatGPT curve is pointing slightly upward again: On May 7, after moving to the chatgpt.com domain, Similarweb recorded 83.5 million visits. On May 13, after a series of announcements by OpenAI, the number was 96.3 million. On the following two days, ChatGPT passed the 100 million mark.
On Friday, May 17, traffic dropped to 88.5 million, but was still significantly higher than any other day in May. On May 20, more than 100 million visits were counted again, resulting in a monthly average of more than 77.7 million visits per day.
At this rate, according to Similarweb, ChatGPT will see up to 2.3 billion visits in May, surpassing the previous high of 1.8 billion visits in May 2023. The web version of ChatGPT is slowly regaining global traffic since its low point in the summer of 2023.
For comparison: Google's Gemini saw about 414 million visits in all of April.
For Google, however, the successful integration of Gemini and generative AI into Google products is probably more important than the number of hits on its standalone chat platform.
But even here, things have not gone smoothly so far: Google's "AI Overviews", i.e., the integration of Gemini into search, got off to a bad start in the U.S. with a lot of media backlash, thanks to nonsensical and sometimes even dangerous AI answers to medical questions.
