ChatGPT Site Traffic Continues to Fall Worldwide

• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, August 4, 2023

Web traffic to OpenAI’s ChatGPT sites continues to fall. Worldwide traffic to chat.openai.com fell 9.7% in June and 9.6% in July. In the U.S., ChatGPT traffic fell 15% in June, then another 4% in July, according to Similarweb.

One thought by analysis from Similarweb is seasonal. School is out, which could cause a dip in traffic. Chegg, an online learning platform that provides educational resources, has seen traffic to its website drop in the past couple of months.

Similarweb cannot make a definitive analysis for the drop in Chegg’s web traffic, because its rival Course Hero has been trending down, too, since early 2022, before the arrival of OpenAI’s chatbot.

Traffic to chegg.com fell 16.8% year over year in May 2023, when college students are expected to look for help studying for finals. It also was down 19.1% in May 2022, months before the introduction of ChatGPT. In April, Chegg announced the CheggMate AI assistant, built with OpenAI’s GPT-4 model.

Similarweb estimates that college-age individuals make up more than one-quarter of the adult audience for ChatGPT. About 28.6% in the U.S., and 27% worldwide.

About 33.50% of the U.S.-age bracket between 35 and 44 use CHatGPT, followed by 28.61% for ages 18 to 24, and 15.90% for ages 34 to 44. It drops to 11.19% for ages 45 to 54%, and 6.51 for ages 55 to 64, and 4.20% for those age 65 and older.

When measuring worldwide traffic, ChatGPT receives more visits than Microsoft’s Bing search engine.

Similarweb estimates 1.47 million visits in July for chat.openai.com, compared with 1.2 million for Bing. The margin, however, continues to widen. The data suggests that some AI chat users may have migrated to Bing, which is powered by the same OpenAI algorithms.