ChatGPT Starts to Bounce Back in US as School Year Resumes

Meanwhile, Character AI does a better job of engaging with young people outside of homework help

One theory about why ChatGPT’s web traffic dropped over the summer is that school was out, which would help explain why the traffic trend stabilized in August as schoolchildren in the US were back in class in greater numbers toward the end of the month.

Traffic to chat.openai.com was up a fraction of a percentage point in the US but still down 3% worldwide, according to Similarweb estimates.

A demographic shift in ChatGPT also dovetails with student use of the website dropping over the summer. Similarweb doesn’t track underage internet users, but we can use the pattern of use for college-age students as a proxy for use by students in general. In the US, traffic dropped 10% in May, 15% in June, and another 4% in July, while over those same months the percentage of users in the 18-24 year age bracket – which had been pushing 30% in April – dropped to less than 27% by July.

Connecting with the youth market is a reliable way of finding a big audience, and by that measure, ChatGPT competitor Character AI has an edge. The character.ai website draws close to 60% of its audience from the 18-24-year-old age bracket, a number that held up well over the summer. Character.AI has also turned website users into users of its mobile app to a greater extent than ChatGPT, which is also now available as an app.

That may be simply because Character AI is a playful companion, not just a homework helper. Users are invited to personalize their chatbots as famous personalities or fictional characters and have them respond in that voice.

Key takeaways

• ChatGPT continues to rank among the largest websites in the world, drawing 1.4 billion worldwide visits in August compared with 1.2 billion for Microsoft’s Bing search engine, for example. From zero prior to its launch in late November, chat.openai.com reached 266 million visitors in December, grew another 131% the following month, and peaked at 1.8 billion visits in May. Similarweb ranks openai.com #28 in the world, mostly on the strength of ChatGPT.
• In the US, visits to the website increased by 0.4% in August, while worldwide they dropped by 3%. That followed three months of traffic falling from its heady peaks of a few months earlier.
• Unique visitors to the website, which had also fallen in June and July, rose 3% month-over-month in the US and 0.3% worldwide in August.
• Character AI and ChatGPT both released mobile apps in recent months, but the gap between them in mobile app usage is much less than in web traffic. In August, Character AI had 4.2 million monthly active users of its iOS and Android apps, compared with about 6 million for ChatGPT. In other words, ChatGPT has about 40% more usage on mobile, compared with nearly a 120% advantage in unique visitors to its website.

ChatGPT traffic curve flattens out

Traffic is no longer falling in the US …

…. and only very slightly worldwide.

The demographic shift

The percentage of ChatGPT users in the 18-24-year-old age bracket dropped over the summer, particularly in the US – and might be expected to recover further in September with more students back in school.

A similar trend played out worldwide.

Character AI captures a more youthful market

Character AI gets a significantly higher percentage of its users from a younger demographic than more “serious” AI chatbots like ChatGPT or Google’s Bard.

Character AI, Bard, and Open AI’s API platform site also had ups and downs

ChatGPT wasn’t the only AI tech website that saw its traffic stutter over the summer, and Character AI also saw a dip – although mobile web users adopting the company’s iOS and Android apps may have more than made up for it. Meanwhile, arguably even more important to Open AI than ChatGPT is getting business users and other technology companies to tap into the APIs it makes available through platform.openai.com.

Character AI punches above its weight on mobile apps

Character AI is close behind ChatGPT in mobile app usage.

On the web, it lags much farther behind. But mobile app engagement is arguably a more intimate way of connecting with the audience Character AI is building.

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Methodology

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by David F. Carr

David covers social media, digital advertising, and generative AI. With a background in web trends since the 1990s, he’s also the author of "Social Collaboration for Dummies".