Is it possible for ChatGPT to eliminate search engines?

The ChatGPT site has surpassed Bing's global visits and many users are using it as a new search engine. However, recent data shows that although the emerging ChatGPT has achieved a surge in visits in a short period of time, it actually accounts for only 2% of Google's visits. In this issue's article, we will compare and analyze the hot performance of ChatGPT, its similar websites and mainstream search engines through several sets of visitation data.

Six months on, ChatGPT's visit growth rate has slowed dramatically

ChatGPT entered the public eye in late November 2022. According to Similarweb's preliminary estimates, ChatGPT had about 266 million global visits as of December 2022 and has been on a growth trend since then as well. As of April 2023, ChatGPT reached approximately 1.76 billion visits globally.

However, after rapid growth, the growth of visits to ChatGPT's website began to level off, with growth rates trending downward. three-month YoY growth rates in Q1 2023 were 131.6%, 62.5% and 55.8%, in that order, and slowed further to 12.6% in April 2023.

Globally, the hotness overwhelms similar sites

Despite the slowdown, ChatGPT's growth in visits has always been striking compared to some websites with similar features.

Similarweb crunched the numbers on the growth of visits to regular search engines Bing and DuckDuckGo, AI virtual celebrity chat site Character.ai, and AI-powered search engine You.com. These sites and ChatGPT overlap in function to varying degrees, but their growth in visits is relatively flat compared to ChatGPT.

The number of visits to Bing and DuckDuckGo fluctuates around 1 billion, while the number of visits to Character.ai and You.com is well below 500 million. ChatGPT, on the other hand, began to grow rapidly in December 2022, surpassing 1.7 billion visits in April 2023.

Shake up Google? It's a little hard

ChatGPT has stimulated the public's interest in generative artificial intelligence and has had an impact on the search engine market, but it still hasn't entered the mainstream of search services, especially compared to Google, ChatGPT's visit volume is quite inferior.

According to Similarweb, as of April 2023, Google search exceeded 70 billion visits, far more than ChatGPT and other search engines.

Moreover, in the U.S., ChatGPT's traffic is only about half that of U.S. search engines DuckDuckGo and Bing, which both have nearly 400 million U.S. visits, while ChatGPT has less than 200 million U.S. visits.

Rather than eliminating, they should complement each other

So far, ChatGPT itself has attracted more visits than any other service utilizing AIGC technology, but it is still quite a long way from surpassing mainstream search engines such as Google, Baidu, and Yandex.

While users are happy to use ChatGPT for their information retrieval needs, ultimately, ChatGPT, as a conversational language model, functions neither as a mere information retrieval nor is it more creative than a search engine in the conventional sense. The mainstream search engine, on the other hand, has the advantage of broad search scope and comprehensive information coverage, and also provides users with structured search results. The two have different functions, but can complement each other's strengths to achieve a combination of depth and breadth of information access and provide a better user experience.