Traffic to ChatGPT owner OpenAI has exploded by 3,572%, from 18.3 million to 672 million visits after ChatGPT’s release at the end of November.
Analysis of SimilarWeb data reveals 672 million users visited the viral AI chatbot in January 2023. Visits have exploded to over 36 times the amount since ChatGPT’s release at the end of November 2022, going from 18.3 million to 672 million in just two months as the new language model continues to make headlines. ChatGPT drives over 92% of total website traffic.
Other main countries that have visitors to the site are France, Canada, and Germany.
"SimilarWeb traffic shows that OpenAI is quickly becoming one of the biggest websites in the world after going viral," a digital adoption spokesperson said.
"While ChatGPT has been tipped as the 'next Google', we know that Google is creating a rival chatbot, Bard, to fend off any competition, which is rumoured to be announced in the coming days," it added.
As of now, OpenAI is the number one technology website in the Computers Electronics and Technology category, overtaking Zoom, AOL and AT&T, the study mentioned.
ChatGPT can generate articles, essays, jokes, poetry and job applications in response to text prompts. OpenAI, a private company backed by Microsoft, made it available to the public for free in late November.
OpenAI also developed the AI-powered image generator Dall-E and is at the forefront of generative AI, or technology trained on vast amounts of text and images that can create content from a simple text prompt.
On Thursday, OpenAI announced a $20 monthly subscription, initially for users in the United States only. It would provide a more stable and faster service as well as the opportunity to try new features first, the company said.
OpenAI has received substantial investments over the years from a variety of sources, including leading tech companies like Microsoft and Amazon, as well as venture capital firms such as Khosla Ventures and Founders Fund. In July 2021, OpenAI announced that it had raised $100 million in a funding round led by Greg Brockman, the company's CEO, with participation from a number of other investors.
Analysts believe the viral launch of ChatGPT will give OpenAI a first-mover advantage against other AI companies. The growing usage, while imposing substantial computing cost on OpenAI, has also provided valuable feedback to help train the chatbot’s responses.
In January, Microsoft announced another multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI in the form of cash and provision of cloud computing.
It said the deal with OpenAI would involve deploying the company’s artificial intelligence models across Microsoft products, which include the Bing search engine and its office software such as Word, PowerPoint and Outlook.
In February Microsoft launched a premium version of its Teams product backed by ChatGPT, offering AI-powered extras such as automatically generated meeting notes. The tool also divides recaps of meetings into sections, based on the meeting transcript.
There are currently 24 million average daily visits to OpenAI.com due to ChatGPT.
Globally, ChatGPT is the fastest-growing app currently, according to investment bank UBS, which reported the chatbot reached 100 million monthly active users by January.
