ChatGPT traffic drops harder than ever. Is the chatbot getting "dumber"?

ChatGPT traffic drops by at least 10%, as recent statistics from web analytics company Similarweb shows. 

Preliminary estimates indicate a significant decrease in global traffic to the ChatGPT website, chat.openai.com, with a decline of 9.7% from May to June. In the United States, the drop was even more pronounced at 10.3%. The number of unique visitors worldwide also saw a decline of 5.7%, while the duration of visitors’ sessions on the website decreased by 8.5%.

Despite these decreases, however, ChatGPT continues to attract a larger global audience compared to Bing.com, Microsoft’s search engine, and Character.AI, the second most popular standalone AI chatbot site. Although Character.AI experienced a 32% decline in month-over-month visits, its traffic has grown significantly since its inception in June 2022, when it was just starting under the guidance of former Google engineers.

The question is, what happens to the world’s most hyped AI chatbot and why is it falling off?

Several users have voiced their discontent regarding specific functionalities of ChatGPT that are no longer operating as anticipated. However, it is worth considering that the drop in traffic might be attributed to the fact that schools are currently on summer vacation, resulting in fewer practical applications for technology in the educational community.

One Reddit user, for instance, shared their disappointment that the AI model can no longer perform spreadsheet calculations, despite being able to do so in the past. Instead, the model now guides how to perform these calculations in Excel. 

Another user complained about the quality of responses, claiming that they have become less detailed. This alleged decline in performance seems to be particularly noticeable in the free version, leading to speculation that OpenAI intentionally limits functionality to encourage users to subscribe to the premium ChatGPT+ service. 

Additionally, it has been reported that OpenAI has eliminated the integration of Bing in ChatGPT. It will be intriguing to observe the implications and outcomes of this decision.

What are your thoughts on ChatGPT traffic drops? Let us know in the comments!