With school out, mobile and desktop web traffic to ChatGPT's site declined

Could the excitement over conversational AI chatbots have cooled off? According to Israeli-based software and data company Similarweb, worldwide desktop and mobile web traffic to the ChatGPT website (chat.openai.com) declined 9.7% from May to June. In the U.S., the decline weighed in at 10.3%. Either way, it was the first month-to-month decline to the site. Accompanying this was Sensor Tower's observation that downloads of ChatGPT's iOS client fell off in June after hitting new heights earlier in the month.

Other data posted by Similarweb confirmed the declining interest in ChatGPT. Unique global visitors to ChatGPT's website declined 5.7% from May to June while the time spent on the website by users declined 8.5%. Visits to Bing's desktop and mobile websites, both of which include ChatGPT, rose between February and March according to a graph posted on Similarweb's site. Since peaking in March, that traffic has since dropped in April, May, and June.

OpenAI, which owns ChatGPT, might not be suffering from the decline even though it costs an estimated $700,000 a day to keep the website running. As Similarweb states, "the ChatGPT website primarily serves as a loss leader generating sales leads for OpenAI, which makes its technology available for other companies to embed in their applications." The revenue earned by OpenAI comes from subscribers to the OpenAI site who want to access the latest version of ChatGPT.

For example, subscribers to the OpenAI site currently can use version GPT-4 while free users can access an earlier version. And while OpenAI's site is not set up to be monetized via ads, the subscription model that OpenAI uses does not seem to be something it can count on to turn huge profits since Microsoft's Bing search engine offers the GPT-4 version of OpenAI for free. Microsoft, of course, is a major investor in ChatGPT.

So what is accounting for the drop off in ChatGPT use? Certainly, some of the excitement of using the chatbot has disappeared. Also, with school out (and we know this sounds quite cynical) fewer students are using ChatGPT to write their papers. And some companies are banning employees from using ChatGPT since they are concerned that secret information might be accidentally input by an employee and find itself made public as part of the answer to a query. Remember AI chatbots improve their responses by remembering past user input.