In a bit of irony, ChatGPT is growing so fast the AI-powered program is starting to rival Microsoft’s Bing search engine in terms of web traffic.
The findings come from internet traffic provider Similarweb, which reports user visits to ChatGPT nearly doubled last month. On a worldwide basis, traffic to the chat.openai.com domain was up 85% in the first 25 days of February compared to the same period from the month before.
“Born at the end of November 2022, ChatGPT is now attracting about as much worldwide traffic as Bing, which has been in existence since 2009,” Similarweb added.
The news is ironic because Microsoft itself has begun integrating ChatGPT into Bing, which did spark a bump in web traffic to the company’s search engine. But according to Similarweb, the traffic gains “appear to have been fleeting." Microsoft recently muzzled the new Bing’s capabilities to prevent the chats from going off the rails.
In contrast, ChatGPT has faced no such chat limit restrictions, although the site has been forced to routinely cut off access due to traffic surges from incoming users. A graph from Similarweb shows ChatGPT is now attracting about 40 million visits globally per day.
In the US, Bing still beats ChatGPT in terms of web traffic, attracting more than twice as many user visits. But the reverse is true in India. “ChatGPT is now drawing twice as much as Bing in India, one of its top traffic sources,” Similarweb said.
India also represents the second largest source of web traffic for ChatGPT at 11.17%, behind the US, which made up 11.27% of the traffic. The AI chatbot has also been trained to converse in various languages, expanding its appeal to users in numerous countries.
Similarweb added: “We might guess that the interest from India reflects both demand from its technology sector, yes, but also from workers who can use ChatGPT to increase their productivity at tasks such as copywriting and coding.”
Bing could regain the upper hand over time. Microsoft plans on releasing the ChatGPT-powered Bing as a mainstream search product to compete with Google. But for now, the experience remains locked behind a waitlist as Redmond continues to iron out the program's various kinks.
According to Similarweb, Bing ranks as the fourth largest search engine globally, behind Google, China’s Baidu, and Russia’s Yandex. However, Google holds a huge lead as the number one search engine, so overtaking it won’t be easy.