Artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT has experienced a decline in user traffic worldwide for the third consecutive month in August, as per data from analytics company Similarweb. Desktop and mobile site traffic to OpenAI's chatbot from global visitors decreased by 3.2% to 1.43 billion in August, following a 10% drop in traffic two months prior. The time spent on the site also slightly decreased from 8.7 minutes to 7 minutes in August.
However, visits from United States-based users began to increase in August by 0.4%. Unique visitors to the site, which declined in June and July, rose by 3% in the U.S. and 0.3% worldwide in August. Similarweb senior insights manager David F. Carr, who regularly tracks AI chatbots and authored the report, suggested that the fluctuation in users could be due to students using the program during summer break and now resuming classes.
This theory is supported by the drop in audience for the summer months of ChatGPT users in the 18–24 age range, both in the U.S. and globally. In the U.S., traffic in the 18–24 age bracket dropped 10% in May, 15% in June, and another 4% in July. At its peak in April, 18–24-year-old visitors made up 30% of the total audience share in the United States. A separate survey from May 2023 by Intelligent.com found that 30% of 1,223 undergraduate and graduate students in the U.S. had used ChatGPT for schoolwork during the academic year.
