As ChatGPT Growth Flattened in May, Google Bard Rose 187%

ChatGPT took off like a rocket in December and grew 132% in January before its growth started to slow. Google’s Bard lags far behind but is growing quickly

The law of gravity finally caught up with OpenAI’s ChatGPT in May, with traffic flattening at about 1.8 billion worldwide visits, according to Similarweb’s preliminary estimates for May. That’s still more than Microsoft Bing, which attracted about 1.25 billion visits from around the world. Bing launched 14 years ago, while ChatGPT was born at the end of November 2022.

Those traffic totals include repeat visits by the same individuals. A unique visitors count for May is not yet available, but in April, 206.7 million ChatGPT unique visitors generated 1.76 billion visits. The total number of individuals who have created accounts since ChatGPT launched in November is no doubt higher. Some analysts have used our metrics to estimate that number, but Similarweb has not released an official estimate of the total user count.

Meanwhile, Google’s Bard chatbot attracted 142.6 million visitors in May, up from 49.7 million in April, according to preliminary data. Both Bard and the Bing chatbot (which incorporates OpenAI’s latest GPT-4 model, which only included with paid accounts for ChatGPT) are free alternatives that have the advantage of access to more up-to-date information than ChatGPT because they are built on top of search engines.

Key takeaways

• ChatGPT (chat.openai.com) attracted 1.8 billion worldwide visits in May, up 2.8% from April. If we break that down to a per-day number (with May having 31 days versus 30 for April), that small monthly increase disappears.
• Traffic to openai.com (the vast majority of which is to the ChatGPT subdomain) was up 2.2% month-over-month in May – but represents a year-over-year increase of nearly 3,700%. A year ago, OpenAI was a research lab little known by anyone other than AI researchers.
• The second largest AI chat website, character.ai, had 281.4 million visits in May, a 62.5% month-over-month increase. Character.AI was founded by former Google engineers who reportedly grew impatient with the company’s hesitance to introduce an AI chat product.
• Google Bard, which just launched in beta in February at bard.google.com, hit 142.6 million visits in May, up 187.2% from April. That helps build Google’s credibility in the generative AI space as it works to incorporate those capabilities into its core search engine and other products. It wasn’t until early May, at the Google I/O conference, that Google announced that Bard was generally available (without a waitlist).

Whether stalling growth for ChatGPT is bad news for OpenAI is debatable. OpenAI may be more likely to profit from API deals like the ones it has with Microsoft rather than from seeing traffic to the ChatGPT website continue to rise. OpenAI hasn’t said how much it costs to run the service, but outside estimates are that it’s north of $700,000 per day. The number of users paying $20 per month for the ChatGPT Plus version likely doesn’t make much of a dent in that number, but OpenAI is using the service to generate awareness and attract commercial deals for access to its APIs.

ChatGPT’s growth flattens

For now, the hockey stick growth curve for ChatGPT seems to be over – even though its growth to date leaves it way ahead of its rivals.

The number of unique visitors attracted is smaller for all of these sites but with an even bigger lead for ChatGPT versus other AI chat sites.

ChatGPT had 206.7 million unique visitors in April, the most recent month for which that statistic is available, compared with 19.5 million for Bard and 13.5 million for Character.AI. Note that Bard comes out ahead of Character.AI by unique visitors, although not by total traffic.

Measured against Bing, ChatGPT is still ahead, worldwide — even as Bing incorporates the same technology

Since jumping ahead in March, ChatGPT has widened its lead over Bing by total traffic, worldwide.

If we narrow the focus to traffic from within the US, Bing is still ahead – and ChatGPT is actually down slightly. Even without accounting for the number of days in the month, US traffic to chat.openai.com was down 10.3% in May, according to preliminary estimates.

US traffic to Bing.com was up 7.9%, month-over-month, and 5.9%, year-over-year.

What will ChatGPT be when it grows up?

OpenAI launched ChatGPT as a technology demo at the end of November, expecting it to make a splash but not anticipating how fast it would grow or how big it would get. The company has an opportunity to build it into a major consumer platform, but based on its existing partnership with Microsoft and other deals it has been cutting, it may be more inclined and equipped to be a technology provider to others.

Intentionally or not, OpenAI has created one of the world’s most trafficked websites. We’ll be interested to see where those traffic numbers go from here.

The Similarweb Insights & Communications team is available to pull additional or updated data on request for the news media (journalists are invited to write to press@similarweb.com). When citing our data, please reference Similarweb as the source and link back to the most relevant blog post or similarweb.com/blog/insights/.

Contact: For more information, please write to press@similarweb.com.

Report By: David F. Carr, Senior Insights Manager

Methodology

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