ChatGPT use in June declines for first time

Updated on: 07 July 2023

Stefanie Schappert
Senior journalist

ChatGPT at capacity seen on a smartphone — By Shutterstock

For the first time since ChatGPT’s November 2022 launch, the number of unique visitors and monthly users at the chatbot’s OpenAI website declined worldwide.

Analytics firm Similarweb showed desktop and mobile traffic to the ChatGPT web address last month had decreased by 9.7%.

Unique visitors to the site also dropped by 5.7%.

Additionally, the data showed the amount of time spent on the website was down 8.5%.

Similarweb's Senior Insights Manager David Carr said the decrease in traffic was a sign that the AI chatbot’s novelty was most likely wearing off.

Still, the ChatGPT platform was globally downloaded more than 17 million times on iOS as of July 4th, according to consumer marketing firm data.ai.

With the widespread adoption of generative AI performing daily tasks from writing to coding, ChatGPT quickly accumulated over 100 million active users by January 2023, barely two months after its release.

Boasting over 1.5 billion user visits per month, ChatGPT is the fastest-growing consumer application ever and one of the top 20 websites in the world – far surpassing Bing, the search engine run by Microsoft using OpenAI's technology.

There was an average of 530,000 downloads per week in the US during its first six weeks of availability, with a peak number of downloads on May 31st, according to data.ai.

In April, ChatGPT reported its active user growth increased to more than 800 million users per month.

"I think there are growing pains when you go from zero to 100 million users that quickly,” said Sarah Hindlian-Bowler, head of Technology Research Americas at Macquarie.

“The extraordinarily heavy infrastructure would result in less accuracy. It's a combination of having to change what the model is trained on and having to deal with the potential implications of regulation," Hindlian-Bowler said.

Other factors contributing to the slowdown in desktop usage could be the release of a ChatGPT app in May and the decrease in students now on summer break from school.

The recent slowdown could be an advantage for its creator OpenAI, as CEO and co-founder Sam Altman has said the costs to run the large language model due to its intense computing power are "eye-watering."