ChatGPT website traffic has fallen for the first time

Since the arrival of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November, the clever AI-powered chatbot has taken the world by storm as people take the tool for a spin while also speculating about how the technology might transform the workplace and wider society.

But for the first time since ChatGPT landed toward the end of last year, visits to the chatbot’s website have dipped, analytics firm Similarweb said.

According to its findings, global traffic to OpenAI’s site for ChatGPT fell by 9.7% in June, while the rate of unique visitors dropped by 5.7%. Also, the amount of time visitors spent on the website was down 8.5%.

Traffic to the website began to level out in May, according to Similarweb’s analysis, so June’s findings may come as little surprise to those closely following the chatbot’s roller-coaster ride.

The analytics firm noted, however, that the site for ChatGPT still attracts more visitors than bing.com, Microsoft’s search engine, and Character.AI, the second most popular standalone AI chatbot site, adding that global visits to Character.AI also fell by 32% month-over-month.

Similarweb suggests the dip in traffic “is a sign that the novelty has worn off for AI chat,” but in truth, such a conclusion is not so easy to draw.

For example, the measures relate only to the website for ChatGPT — chat.openai.com — and not its more recent mobile apps, which at least some people will be using instead of heading to the website. Also, Microsoft, which is investing huge sums of money in OpenAI, has incorporated elements of the chatbot into its Bing search engine, giving people another reason to bypass the website.

Additionally, ChatGPT’s arrival has brought a huge amount of attention to generative AI and similar tools that include not only text-based offerings but also new image- and video-generation software. In other words, as people learn more about the technology, they could be heading to other AI tools to try those out, too.

Considering all this, it’s hardly straightforward to say that interest is waning in ChatGPT, though of course there may be cases where some folks have had a brief go and left it at that — for now at least.

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