ChatGPT is losing some of its hype, as traffic falls for the third month in a row
- The number of visits to ChatGPT's website has fallen for three months in a row, per Similarweb.
- Although it seems to be leveling off, and could be linked to students being off for summer.
ChatGPT took the world by storm when it was released last November, but it looks like it's losing momentum.
August marked the third month in a row that the number of monthly visits to ChatGPT's website worldwide was down, according to data from analytics firm Similarweb.
And the average time spent on OpenAI's chatbot has been declining every month since March, from 8.7 minutes to 7 minutes in August, per Similarweb data shared by Reuters.
Although Similarweb reports that while the total number of visits declined by around 10% in June and July, that leveled off a bit in August, with a decline of 3%. In the US alone, visits to the ChatGPT website increased by 0.4% in August.
There was also a small increase in the number of unique visitors last month — about 0.3% — from 180 million to 180.5 million, per Reuters.
"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," David F. Carr, a senior insights manager at Similarweb, wrote in the report.
Before Meta's Threads assumed the title in July, ChatGPT was the fastest-growing app ever when it reached 100 million users in two months.
Some of that hype was prompted by students, leading to professors finding ways to combat ChatGPT plagiarism, and one Princeton student launching GPTZero to detect if an essay was written by AI.
But it's also being used in the workplace, with employees using ChatGPT to write code, do research, and improve time management.
In July, users of OpenAI's latest model, GPT-4, started complaining that the chatbot's performance had declined. A paper from Stanford and Berkeley academics found GPT-4 was less accurate in a number of tasks — like a 2.4% accuracy in identifying prime numbers compared to 97.6% accuracy three months earlier.
OpenAI did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.