ChatGPT Monthly Visits: SEO Analysis & Competitor Comparisons

ChatGPT’s traffic keeps growing, and the platform seems to attract more and more users as time goes by. At the same time, Google, the undisputed global traffic leader, also claims its traffic and searches are growing despite the global trend leaning towards AI usage. What’s more, traffic from chatbots tends to be more targeted, referring users who are more engaged and more likely to convert than those coming from Google.

Why is this an SEO concern?

As an SEO, I need to understand and analyze these shifts when I create or carry out my strategy. As an SEO, my agility is limited, so I need to be aware of market shifts and predict the next ones to lay down the groundwork beforehand. We all explored the how and why of optimizing for AI engines, but that’s not enough for a long-term strategy.

I want to know where the traffic is headed next, what types of users it brings, and how I can know which platform is best at matching user search intent (or prompt intent)with the right answers and will eventually win the most users, or to be more accurate, what SEOs should be optimizing for?

I used Similarweb data to analyze not only web traffic to chatgpt.com, but also look into engagement and usage metrics, and compare it to its competitors. I can already tell you I found a few surprises.

Summarize with ChatGPT | Google AI | Perplexity | Grok

ChatGPT.com Global Traffic & Engagement: Monthly Trend

ChatGPT.com scaled from 2.6B to 5.7B monthly visits (+117%) during the last 12 months and 6% MoM. We can also see some stagnation during May-July, and even a small decrease in MoM traffic in June vs May. Desktop gets ChatGPT the most traffic, but mobile growth is faster than desktop, especially in late 2024/2025. Despite this, ChatGPT is only #6 in our global websites ranking, with giants like Instagram and Facebook above it.

ChatGPT’s engagement metrics also improved YoY, with average visit time up to 425 seconds, and over 4 pages per visit. This suggests either deeper content, stickier features, or a maturing customer base. However, when looking deeper into the monthly trend, I can see that the average session duration has actually decreased since April.

This can mean that users may be coming into ChatGPT, but maybe lately, they’re not getting what they came for. When comparing these metrics to the competitors, I can see that ChatGPT is indeed falling behind the competition (more details in the comparison section).

While ChatGPT often resonates with a younger audience (23.4% of users aged 18-24 and 29% 25-34), we (and they) must also keep in mind that this audience is quick to change and quick to leave once they have been disappointed. They are the ones always looking out for new things to try, and are the quickest ones to adopt them until the next new thing comes along.

ChatGPT traffic sources breakdown

For further investigation, I broke down the traffic data into the different channels. I found that while direct traffic is the most prominent, organic search traffic has increased from 743M organic visits in December 24 to almost 1B monthly visitors in July 25, and can indicate expanded SEO activities and increased organic search value.

I also found out that they increased their investment in PPC in April 2025, doubling traffic from Paid search. Other channels seem to have a steady growth with no special events.

If I connect this to their engagement data, it seems that metrics have started declining when ChatGPT expanded its PPC activities. While that’s an expected outcome of some paid activities, bounce rate also increased following the PPC investment, suggesting some campaigns may not align with user intent and could benefit from optimization or a different approach.

Market trends affecting ChatGPT.com’s monthly traffic

Since 2024, we have seen a surge in AI investments, as everyone tries to be the first to build the next sensation. Google launches Gemini public beta, Perplexity rounds of funding drive massive traffic spikes to both competitors and ChatGPT. ChatGPT.com also expanded its activities in India, Brazil, and non-English-speaking regions (coinciding with localization/content updates)

Search trends for the AI tools have been increasing more and more, as “AI chatbot,” “ChatGPT 4,” “Perplexity AI,” and “Gemini Google” hit record volumes in multiple languages. For example, see the search trend for the term “AI Chatbot”, and the clear rise in interest since August 2024. This is not just about the ChatGPT brand, it’s a general public interest in AI.

ChatGPT vs Competitors: Google, Perplexity, Grok & Gemini

ChatGPT monthly visits vs Google Search

With over 84 billion visits during July, Google remains the #1 platform for searchers. ChatGPT, despite a very impressive growth of 117% in traffic year over year, only got 5.7 billion visits. I doubt ChatGPT can keep up this growth in the upcoming years, but seeing how relatively stagnant Google’s traffic is, I think that unless Google finds a new way to grow, ChatGPT might eventually take over (data shows it should be in about 5 years).

To top that, Google wins over ChatGPT also in engagement metrics:

Seems it’s not only traffic domination. Google also rolled out its AI Overviews and AI Mode, which may show a better ability to answer users’ queries with relevant information. However, since Google used to link internally from their own AI Overviews to other Google searches, there’s a chance it inflated the “Pages per visit” metric. For now, the winner and clear leader is still Google.

ChatGPT monthly visits vs Grok

When it comes to ChatGPT vs Grok, there’s still no real competition in terms of traffic. While Grok is widely used inside x.com, but still ramping up as a standalone platform (with an added recent domain migration to grok.com), the gap is wide in favor of GPT with its 5.7B visits vs Grok’s 201M in July 2025.

When it comes to engagement metrics, we see the same picture:

Grok.com was launched in January 2025 and has shown great growth since then, including a 27% growth month over month from June. Having said that, they might be too recognized with X and Elon Musk, which means they are getting a ton of PR and buzz, but not necessarily positive (including users leaving due to personal opinions unrelated to the actual AI). They have also changed URLs many times now, which might be slowing down their growth as well. While ChatGPT is a clear winner here, only the future can tell what will become of Grok.

ChatGPT monthly visits vs Perplexity

Perplexity had an X3 traffic growth in the past 12 months, and is up to 140 million visits in July 2025. However, that is still 1/40 of ChatGPT’s 5.7 billion visits. Perplexity is very strong in the US, and with tech-savvy users worldwide, while ChatGPT has more of a general audience that’s oriented toward simpler day-to-day tasks and questions.

ChatGPT vs. Perplexity engagement metrics:

Perplexity’s technical power-user audience may be faithful, but they are still no match for ChatGPT’s reach and audience. While engagement gaps are small, ChatGPT still holds the advantage both in traffic and engagement.

ChatGPT monthly visits vs Gemini

Amongst ChatGPT’s competitors, Gemini is the closest contender. Reaching almost 700 million visits in July 2025, it seems like Gemini is closing the traffic gap the fastest. This may not be such a surprise since Gemini is Google’s AI, but it does say something about the overall “war” between Google and ChatGPT over users and traffic.

ChatGPT vs. Gemini engagement metrics:

Despite showing the best traffic growth among ChatGPT’s challengers, Gemini still has a way to go in terms of improving engagement metrics. Gemini also has Google’s AI Mode competing with it, as Google is covering all aspects of its rivalry with ChatGPT, which might also prevent it from growing at a quicker pace. As Google search still rules, in the future, users might start their journey with AI Mode and not search, making it the most visited website and AI chatbot.

Conclusions: Market & SEO Strategy

ChatGPT’s monthly traffic is growing at an amazing pace, and ChatGPT.com is the AI chatbot king in web traffic, with more than 8x visits ahead of Gemini in July 2025, and it loses in engagement and user loyalty only to Google. With mobile traffic increasing more than desktop traffic, I doubt August will present any type of challenge to ChatGPT’s traffic.

As searchers’ use of AI grows, direct traffic remains ChatGPT’s most solid traffic source, but SEO seems to be a very high-potential traffic channel with branded terms like “ChatGPT,” non-branded terms like “AI chat,” and comparative terms like “Gemini comparison,” getting very high search volumes.

This means that the SEO industry, despite the GPT hype, should still be aiming to get traffic from Google. However, Google’s state of advantage could be only temporary, and traffic from Google is declining by the day, so I’d not remove my foot from that paddle as well and start optimizing in parallel, especially since ChatGPT is sending very targeted, highly converting traffic (when it does). Double down on opportunities for cites and links, and make your content as LLM compatible as possible.

Similarweb offers many Web Intelligence solutions, including Gen-AI Intelligence and a suite of SEO tools that provide all the data you need to analyze website traffic, as well as track traffic from Chatbots, and create an SEO strategy to complement both LLMs and Google.

FAQ

Is ChatGPT’s traffic growing or declining in 2025?

Growing. Despite some setbacks in May-June, ChatGPT’s traffic has grown 117% YoY, and 6% month over month from June to July.

What drives the most traffic to ChatGPT: Search, Direct, or Social?

Direct channel is dominant in driving traffic to ChatGPT, but organic search traffic is also booming, growing from 743M visits in June to almost 1B in July.

How can SEOs benefit from understanding ChatGPT’s traffic trends?

SEOs can analyze ChatGPT and other chatbots’ traffic to understand how to divide and prioritize their efforts, which venue deserves the most attention and is expected to drive more users to their website, and which is losing the race.

by Limor Barenholtz

Director of SEO at Similarweb

Limor brings 20 years of SEO expertise, focusing on Technical SEO, JavaScript rendering, and mobile optimization. She thrives on solving complex problems and creating scalable strategies.