Open AI's ChatGPT records third monthly drop in traffic in August

The wildly popular artificial intelligence chatbot was launched in November

The amount of time visitors spent on the ChatGPT website has also been declining on monthly basis since March. Reuters

OpenAI's ChatGPT, the wildly popular artificial intelligence chatbot launched in November, registered a fall in monthly website visits for the third month in a row in August, although there are signs the decline is coming to an end, analytics company Similarweb has said.

Worldwide desktop and mobile website visits to the ChatGPT website decreased by 3.2 per cent to 1.43 billion in August, following about 10 per cent drops from each of the previous two months.

The amount of time visitors spent on the website has also been declining on monthly basis since March, from an average of 8.7 minutes on site to seven minutes on site in August.

But in August, worldwide unique visitors ticked up to 180.5 million users from 180 million.

School coming back into session in September may help ChatGPT's traffic and usage, and some schools have begun to embrace it.

US ChatGPT traffic in August rose slightly, in concert with American schools being back in session.

“Students seeking homework help appears to be part of the story: the percentage of younger users of the website dropped over the summer and is now starting to bounce back,” said David Carr of Similarweb, who regularly tracks ChatGPT and its competitors.

ChatGPT set off a frenzied use of generative AI in daily tasks – from editing to coding – and reached 100 million monthly active users in January, two months after its launch.

Generative AI technology uses past data to create new content, for instance, to write essays or poems.

Before Meta’s Threads launch, it was the fastest-growing consumer application, and is now one of the top 30 websites in the world.

A few ChatGPT competitors, including Google's Bard chatbot, have been launched this year. Microsoft's search engine Bing also provides a free chatbot powered by OpenAI.

OpenAI also released the ChatGPT app on the iOS system in May, which could sap some traffic from its website. ​ChatGPT is free to use but also provides a premium subscription for $20 a month.

Besides ChatGPT, OpenAI makes money by selling access to its AI models to developers and enterprises directly and through a partnership with Microsoft, which invested more than $10 billion into the company.