OpenAI’s ChatGPT, affiliated with OpenAI, has experienced a monthly decline in website visits for the third consecutive month in August.
Similarweb, an analytics company, reported that signs indicate the decline is nearing its end.
Visits to the ChatGPT website on desktop and mobile devices globally decreased by 3.2% to 1.43 billion visits in August 2023, following a roughly 10% drop in the previous two months.
The amount of time visitors spend on the site has also decreased monthly since March, dropping from an average of 8.7 minutes to 7 minutes in August.
However, the number of unique visitors worldwide in August increased to 180.5 million from 180 million, the opening of schools in September in many countries may boost traffic to ChatGPT, especially as some schools have begun to incorporate it.
Traffic to ChatGPT in the United States slightly increased in August, coinciding with school openings there.
David F. Carr from Similarweb, which regularly tracks ChatGPT and its competitors, stated, “It seems that students seeking help with their schoolwork are part of the story; the percentage of younger users on the site dropped during the summer and is now bouncing back.”
The launch of the AI-powered chatbot in November last year led to widespread adoption of the technology in daily tasks, from editing to programming, reaching 100 million monthly active users in January, just two months after its launch.
Generative AI technology uses previous data to create new content for writing articles or poems.
Before the launch of Meta’s text communication app Threads, ChatGPT was the fastest-growing consumer app ever, and it is now one of the top 30 websites in the world.
A few competitors to ChatGPT were released earlier this year, including Google’s Bard. Microsoft’s Bing search engine also offers a chatbot using the same large language model as ChatGPT.
OpenAI also released ChatGPT for iOS in May and for Android in July.
While ChatGPT is available for free to users, OpenAI offers a paid version of the software with exclusive features for $20 per month.
In addition to ChatGPT, OpenAI generates revenue by selling access to its AI models directly to developers and companies, as well as through a partnership with Microsoft, which invested over $10 billion in the company.
