ChatGPT had created history by becoming the fastest product in history to reach 100 million users, but it seems that some of the initial enthusiasm is now ebbing away.
The monthly visits to ChatGPT’s website have fallen for the first time since its launch in November last year. In May, ChatGPT had registered nearly 1.75 billion visits across web and mobile, but this number fell to 1.60 billion in June. This is the first time that ChatGPT’s monthly visits have fallen month-on-month. After launching in November 2022, ChatGPT had recorded 250 million visits in December 2022, 600 million visits in January 2022, 1 billion visits in February, 1.6 billion visits in March, 1.7 billion visits in April and 1.75 billion visits in May. In June, however, the visits fell to 1.6 billion.
Monthly visits ChatGPT (blue), Bing (orange), Character AI (purple) and Google Bard (black) SimilarWeb data from the All in podcast
Similar trends are seen in other AI apps. Microsoft’s search engine Bard had seen a spike from 1.2 billion visits in February to nearly 1.4 billion visits in March, but appears to have largely returned to its pre-AI levels. Character AI too saw its monthly visits fall for the first time in June. The only exception here is Google Bard, which continued to grow in June, but on a much smaller base than ChatGPT.
This fall in interest in ChatGPT was also mirrored in Google Trends data. Since March, searches for ChatGPT have been steadily declining. The decline in June has been particularly sharp, and interest in ChatGPT now seems to be back at where it was in February this year.
Now it’s possible that fewer people are using ChatGPT because schools were on holidays in June, and students don’t need to refer to it to finish their assignments. But it’s also likely that many visits to ChatGPT were from people curious to see what the new technology was like, and once they’ve had a look, they seem to no longer want to use it in their daily life. ChatGPT indisputably has many uses, but it can be argued that large sections of the population don’t necessarily need to log on it it regularly at this point. And if that’s the case — and if ChatGPT doesn’t bring on more killer functionality — its popularity might’ve already peaked.