ChatGPT visits pull back, traffic growth rate slopes down steeply
May 9, 2023 - Since it opened to the public at the end of November last year, ChatGPT, OpenAI's chatbot, has drawn a user growth curve that has wowed Internet practitioners. But the signs are that the explosive growth of ChatGPT's traffic is approaching a bottleneck as the first glimpse of the big universal model fades.
According to new research from web traffic data site SimilarWeb, total desktop and mobile device visits to ChatGPT continued to rise to 1.76 billion in the month of April just passed, up 12.6% from March. While there is an element of a larger base, the slope of growth has clearly slowed compared to the year-over-year growth rates in January (131.6%), February (62.5%) and March (55.8%).
(Source: SimilarWeb, same below)
In a way, this also reflects that ChatGPT itself has reached a fairly advanced position in the Internet space, surpassing long-running platforms such as the New York Times and CNN. Even when compared to the search engine industry, the tip of the traffic economy, ChatGPT has surpassed Bing and DuckDuckGo, a popular search engine in the U.S. Although the gap with Google is still very large, ChatGPT's traffic can already be drawn on the same chart as Baidu and the Russian search engine Yandex. in the same chart as Baidu and Russian search engine Yandex.
It is worth mentioning that Bing, which once led to a steep upward trend in traffic in March by accessing the GPT-4 big model, also saw a decline in April from the previous year. Last week, Microsoft announced that the Bing Chat feature was free to all users, which was theoretically conducive to pushing up traffic figures. But the latest traffic figures also show that both ChatGPT and Bing have a long way to go before they can "shake up Google", an ambitious goal.
SimilarWeb also said that ChatGPT's traffic growth rate has dropped significantly, which is also a factor of the company's active choice. In addition to letting users pay $20 a month to open a subscription service, OpenAI also offers API services to other software and websites, which are billed based on specific usage. To some extent, ChatGPT's web pages are more of a "test drive" to showcase the technology than to make money.
Although ChatGPT (and Bing) have not yet shown the trend of "swallowing Google" in the search engine market, ChatGPT has quietly done a complete disruption for some segments.
Investors who follow U.S. stocks should have heard about Chegg's plunge in the past few days. Before ChatGPT bubbled to the surface, students in the U.S. often went to Chegg to search for answers and solutions to classroom assignments, but that part of the function was almost a complete collision with ChatGPT. Chegg shares have fallen nearly 60% on the year after admitting "revenue was impacted by ChatGPT" in its latest quarterly report last week.
(Chegg daily chart, source: TradingView)
SimilarWeb also offers an explanation from a traffic perspective. According to the data, the number of "conversion visits" to Chegg's website - visits that led to a payment - plunged 89% year-over-year in March, with the corresponding conversion rate falling to 0.04% from 0.36% in the same month in 2022. In retrospect, Chegg has recorded a 60% year-over-year plunge in the number of converted visits during the traditional peak of visits in January, the start of the school year.