The growth rate of ChatGPT usage traffic has begun to slow down

In contrast to its initial launch, which garnered over 100 million users in approximately two months, OpenAI’s ChatGPT has begun to experience a deceleration in usage.

Similarweb’s website analytics data reveals that after ChatGPT went live in November last year, it accumulated around 266 million connections in December, a traffic volume comparable to that of Yahoo News. In January, traffic increased by 131.6%, followed by a decrease to 62.5% in February, and a further contraction to 55.8% in March. By April, the growth rate had diminished to a mere 12.6%, yet it still boasted 1.76 billion usage instances.

The rapid decline in growth after a few months suggests that the initial surge of traffic for ChatGPT was due to the novelty of the experience and the numerous businesses conducting tests and analyses. The massive traffic growth in the first few months following the launch was followed by a waning interest and, consequently, a more gradual increase in usage.

Nevertheless, despite the slowdown in traffic growth, the current 1.76 billion usage instances still surpass the traffic of services such as Microsoft Bing, The New York Times, and CNN within the United States. However, when compared to the more frequently used Google search service, ChatGPT’s traffic constitutes a mere 2% of its volume.

In the wake of ChatGPT’s debut, an increasing number of autoregressive AI services have emerged, including Google’s “Bard,” which will be further detailed at Google I/O 2023, and the autoregressive AI service that AWS claims to be adopting.