By
Bena Ilyas
May 10th, 2024
Some market analysts believe that people are slowly becoming less interested in AI chat and that the initial excitement is fading away.
ChatGPT, the worldwide popular artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, witnessed a drop in traffic for the month of June. This is the first month of traffic drop seen by ChatGPT ever since its launch to the public back in November 2022.
Compared to the previous month of May 2022, the traffic for ChatGPT dropped by 10% during the month of June, as per the traffic analytics site Similarweb. This includes the combined drop on both – desktop and mobile.
Furthermore, the number of people visiting the website and the time they spend on it have also decreased. The website’s unique visitors have gone down by 5.7%, and users are spending 8.5% less time on the site. In the United States, there has been a significant 10.3% decrease in monthly traffic to the website.
However, even with the decline in traffic, the website is still performing better than other competitors like Google’s Bard, Microsoft’s Bing, and a similar chatbot called Character AI. Despite the challenges, ChatGPT still remains the popular choice among investors.
According to David F. Carr, senior insights manager at Similarweb, the decline in interest in ChatGPT suggests that people are becoming less interested in AI chat and the initial excitement has faded away. Carr emphasized that chatbots will now need to demonstrate their value instead of being assumed as valuable.
There is speculation that the decline in website usage could be attributed to the fact that many users are students who are currently on their summer break.
ChatGPT Unleashes OpenAI vs Google
The launch of ChatGPT last year in November 2022 by OpenAI stormed the tech industry with many seeing the generative AI chatbot as a replacement to search engines in the future. This means that going ahead, OpenAI will be taking on tech behemoths like Google.
But compared to Google, which attracts around 84 billion visitors every month, ChatGPT currently has only 1.8 billion visitors as of the last report in April. For comparison, Bing, a search engine with only about 3% market share compared to Google’s 93%, has over 1.1 billion users.
OpenAI introduced the ChatGPT Plus subscription to its business model because the free version of ChatGPT was incurring very high computing costs, as mentioned by Sam Altman. Other companies have also benefited from using OpenAI’s technology.
Microsoft partnered with OpenAI to incorporate GPT-4 into Bing Chat, creating a smarter search engine in the form of a chatbot. According to the analytics report from Similarweb, traffic to the OpenAI developer site increased by 3.1% from May to June.