OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the most widely used AI chatbot worldwide has been stagnating in terms of growth ever since last year. Meanwhile, Anthropic’s Claude has seen rapid expansion, especially with the release of Claude 3 in March, making it the fastest-growing AI chat platform currently.
According to data from Similarweb, ChatGPT nearly reached its peak activity in March 2024, with 1.77 billion visits, closely approaching its record of 1.81 billion visits set in May 2023. This shows how ChatGPT’s online traffic has not grown for over a year.
After peaking in May 2023, ChatGPT’s popularity saw a dip and only managed to recover its users slowly ever since. In the United States, traffic in March 2024 was 33% higher compared to the same month last year, indicating a resurgence after the initial robust growth phase in early 2023.
However, despite making an improvement in overall user numbers, ChatGPT has not been able to replicate its booming success seen through the November 2022 – May 2023 period. This may be the reason why OpenAI has started putting more effort into growing its Enterprise subscription tier.
Even new and major features have not been able to help with traffic such as the introduction of custom GPTs as well as a GPT Store and image generation through DALL-E 3. Users of custom GPTs stood at 56.5 million in March.
Before custom GPTs and DALL-E 3, ChatGPT’s traffic was 50.5 million, but this was still a meager 3% higher than March, but impressibly higher than November’s traffic with a 68% improvement. Following the plugins, there is speculation that GPTs could be the next major initiative by OpenAI to underperform.
This puts ChatGPT’s growth at only 13% every month, while Anthropic’s Claude chatbot is far ahead in this regard with a 161% increase in March, albeit from a much smaller base. This is all thanks to Anthropic’s recent Claude 3 release, which beats GPT 4 in a few benchmarks. It is worth mentioning that Claude’s reach is far smaller than ChatGPT since it is only accessible in the EU and only through API, not a dedicated website.
Despite the lack of growth, ChatGPT’s lead is still massive when it comes to standalone platforms. While Claude is gaining fast on its OpenAI rival, it has only gained a fraction of ChatGPT’s total users. It also remains to be seen how long Claude will be able to maintain this upward momentum.
