ChatGPT traffic drops 10% in June as user boom fades

Some market analysts believe that interest in chatting with artificial intelligence is slowly waning, and the initial excitement is fading.

ChatGPT, the world's popular artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, witnessed lower traffic in June, the first time ChatGPT has seen a traffic drop since its launch to the public in November 2022.

According to data from traffic analytics site Sametimeweb, ChatGPT traffic fell 10% in June compared to the previous month in May 2022, which includes a combined decline on desktop and mobile.

Additionally, the number of people visiting the site and the amount of time spent on it has also decreased. The site saw a 5.7% decrease in unique visitors and 8.5% less time spent on the site. In the U.S., the site's monthly traffic dropped by a massive 10.3%.

However, even with the drop in traffic, the site still outperformed other competitors such as Google's Bard, Microsoft's Bing, and a similar chatbot called Character AI. Despite the challenges, ChatGPT remains a popular choice for investors.

David F. Carr, Senior Insights Manager at Sameweb, said the drop in interest in ChatGPT shows that interest in AI chat is waning and that the initial excitement has faded. Carr emphasized that chatbots now need to prove their worth, not be perceived as valuable.

There has been speculation that the drop in site usage may be due to the fact that many users are students currently on summer vacation.

ChatGPT unleashes OpenAI against Google

OpenAI's ChatGPT, launched in November 2022 last year, has taken the tech industry by storm, with many seeing generative AI chatbots as a future search engine replacement, which means OpenAI will continue to challenge tech giants like Google.

But compared to Google, which attracts about 84 billion monthly visitors, ChatGPT currently only has 1.8 billion visitors as of April's most recent report. In contrast, Bing is a search engine with a market share of only about 3%, while Google has a 93% market share but has more than 1.1 billion users.

As Sam Altman mentioned, OpenAI introduced ChatGPT Plus subscriptions into its business model because the free version of ChatGPT would incur very high computational costs. Other companies have also benefited from using OpenAI's technology.

Microsoft has partnered with OpenAI to incorporate GPT-4 into Bing Chat to create a smarter search engine in the form of chatbots. Traffic to the OpenAI developer site grew 3.1 percent from May to June, according to an analysis by Similarweb.