Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT, launched by OpenAI, has been experiencing a slight dip in its monthly website visits for the third consecutive month. This trend was spotted in August by the analytics firm Similarweb. However, the firm also indicates that this decrease in traffic may be nearing an end, based on its latest data.
According to Similarweb, both desktop and mobile visits to the ChatGPT website declined by 3.2 percent, bringing the total visits to 1.43 billion in August. This pattern follows around 10 percent reductions in each of the two preceding months. Furthermore, the duration spent by visitors on the platform has been on a steady decrease since March. The average visitor spent about 7 minutes on the website in August, down from an average of 8.7 minutes per visit in March.
Despite the overall traffic decline, the number of unique visitors globally showed a slight increase in August, reaching 180.5 million users, up from 180 million. An interesting observation is that the traffic from the US showed a slight uptick, which coincided with the reopening of schools in August. It has been speculated that the use of AI chatbots like ChatGPT could be linked to the academic needs of students.
ChatGPT has made an enormous splash in the technology world, particularly in the sphere of generative AI. It has been adopted for a myriad of everyday tasks, from editing to coding, and boasted a whopping 100 million monthly active users in January, just two months post its launch. Generative AI technology uses historical data to generate new content, such as essays or poems. Before Threads, launched by Meta, came onto the scene, ChatGPT held the title of fastest-growing consumer application ever and still remains among the top 30 global websites.
In conclusion, while competition in the world of AI chatbots is heating up and some traffic may be diverted to the recently launched iOS app, the future of ChatGPT remains bright. The service remains free to use, with a premium subscription available. It's also important to note that OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, generates revenue through selling access to its AI models and via a partnership with Microsoft. It will be interesting to watch how these dynamics affect the platform's traffic in the months to come.