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 second consecutive month since its launch in November last year. In May, ChatGPT had registered nearly 1.9 billion visits across web and mobile, but this number fell to 1.7 billion in June, and has now fallen to 1.5 billion visits in June. This is the second 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 1.7 billion, and have further fallen to 1.5 billion in July.
A similar trend in seen in Google Trends data. After rising rapidly and peaking in May, searches for ChatGPT have been falling over the last two months.
Now it’s possible that fewer people are using ChatGPT because schools were on holidays in June and July, 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.