In terms of monthly users, it can only be compared to Google Chrome, which boasts approximately 3.45 billion users.
Statistics from Similarweb reveal that ChatGPT saw a 17.2 per cent month-over-month (MoM) growth and a staggering 115.9 per cent year-over-year (YoY) traffic growth.
This surge in traffic can be attributed to several factors, including its parent company, OpenAI, updating the web address from a subdomain, chat.openai.com, to a main domain, chatgpt.com.
Similarweb researcher David F. Carr said that in May 2024, ChatGPT reached a milestone of 2.2 billion visits, and it has been growing ever since.
While ChatGPT has maintained a significant presence in the technology industry since November 2022, OpenAI continues to enhance the product with new versions, features, and supplementary applications, known as GPTs, to keep users engaged.
Recently, the company introduced ChatGPT Search, an in-house search engine feature providing real-time answers to queries, including sports scores, breaking news, and stock quotes.
Many observers note that ChatGPT has come full circle, offering services akin to the industry it was designed to disrupt—Google Search.
Despite the web-based versions of ChatGPT relying on browsers to function, Google’s Chrome browser continues to dominate with a robust market share of 35.4 billion users in 2024.
Although Chrome has seen minimal YoY growth, it has expanded by 45.35 per cent over the past five years, according to Statscounter.
Meanwhile, other AI tools also report significant traffic and growth, albeit not at ChatGPT's level.
The Perplexity chatbot, despite recent plagiarism claims, saw 90.8 million visits in October, marking a 25.5 per cent MoM growth and 199.2 per cent YoY growth.
Google’s Gemini Chatbot reported 291.6 million visits in October, with a 6.2 per cent MoM growth and a 19 per cent YoY growth, following a ChromeOS update that introduced new AI features to Chromebooks.
Anthropic’s Claude chatbot experienced 84.1 million visits in October, reflecting a 25.5 per cent MoM growth and a significant 394.9 per cent YoY growth, following the launch of a desktop application for Windows and macOS.
Microsoft's web-based Copilot website saw 69.4 million visits in October, demonstrating an 87.6 per cent MoM growth.
NotebookLM, based on Google generative models, saw 31.5 million visits in October, with over 200 per cent MoM growth. This note-taking, document, link, and content collection app enables users to process and summarise various formats of information using AI prompts.
