ChatGPT’s Growth Is Flatlining

With web traffic declines in five of the past eight months, where does OpenAI's breakout hit go from here?

ChatGPT is stagnating. The megahit chatbot from OpenAI has seen declining web traffic in five of the past eight months and is currently down 11% from its May 2023 peak. Its mobile app, meanwhile, is going nowhere fast, with fewer total users than Snapchat added last quarter alone. 

The new data, from analytics firm Similarweb, indicates OpenAI’s post-ChatGPT era is arriving faster than many anticipated. Though OpenAI initially envisioned the bot as a demo for its GPT models, it quickly grew into something much larger, leading to big dreams about what it could be. Now, as growth tails off, the company will have to press harder on its other efforts, and ask why its flagship product couldn’t sustain its rapid acceleration. 

“As much attention as they’ve attracted, ChatGPT is still not mainstream,” David Carr, senior insights manager at SimilarWeb, told me. 

Here’s what the data looks like and what it means: