ChatGPT monthly usage may now rival Google Chrome

A number of popular generative AI platforms are seeing consistent growth as users are figuring out how they want to use the tools — and ChatGPT is at the top of the list with the most visits, at 3.7 billion worldwide. So many people are visiting the AI chatbot, and its figures are rivaling browser market share. It can only be compared to Google Chrome figures in terms of monthly users, which is estimated to be around 3.45 billion.

Statistics from Similarweb indicate that ChatGPT saw a 17.2% month-over-month (MoM) growth and a 115.9% year-over-year (YoY) traffic growth. Some highlights that spurned the ChatGPT growth during 2024 include its parent company, OpenAI, updating its web address from a subdomain, chat.openai.com, to a main domain, chatgpt.com. The tool especially saw a surge of traffic in May 2024, when it hit a 2.2-billion-visit milestone, and has been growing ever since, according to Similarweb researcher David F. Carr.

While ChatGPT has had an infamous presence in the technology industry since November 2022, OpenAI, continues to flesh out its product with new versions, features, and supplementary applications, or GPTs, to keep users interested. Recently, the company introduced ChatGPT Search, an in-house search engine feature that allows users to receive real-time answers to queries, such as sports scores, breaking news, and stock quotes.

Many note how the generative AI tool has come full circle to offer services very similar to the industry its intended to displace, Google Search. Overall, the web-based versions of ChatGPT would still rely on browsers to exist. In comparison, Google’s Chrome browser has a solid market share of 35.4 billion users in 2024. It has seen minimal growth YoY but has grown 45.35% in the last 5 years, according to Statscounter.

Other recent news indicates that OpenAI has purchased the domain name Chat.com; however, there is no word on what the company plans to do with this product.

Meanwhile, other AI tools continue to see traffic and growth, despite not being at the same level as ChatGPT. Despite recent plagiarism claims, the Perplexity chatbot has seen 90.8 million visits in October, a 25.5% MoM growth and 199.2% YoY growth. Google’s Gemini Chatbot saw 291.6 million visits in October, a 6.2% MoM growth and 19% YoY growth after the company introduced a new ChromeOS update that brought new AI features to its Chromebooks.

Anthropic’s Claude chatbot has seen 84.1 million visits in October, a 25.5% MoM growth and 394.9% YoY growth, after recently rolling out a desktop application for Windows and macOS. Microsoft’s web-based Copilot website saw 69.4 million visits in October, an 87.6% MoM growth.

Lastly, NotebookLM has seen 31.5 million visits in October, an over 200% MoM growth. Based on Google generative models, the note-taking, document, link, and content collection app allows users to process and summarize different formats of information using AI prompts.