OpenAI, a distinguished entity on the earth of artificial intelligence (AI), has experienced a notable decrease in web traffic within the span of just three months. The organization’s monthly visitor count went from a staggering 959.5 million to 780.1 million, representing an 18.7% decline. Such data underscores the volatile nature of online traffic, and it showcases that even AI giants which are backed by Microsoft are usually not proof against a steep drop in traffic.
These traffic stats come courtesy of SimilarWeb, a digital market intelligence platform that provides insights into website traffic, rankings, and user engagement. With the potential to observe billions of web pages, SimilarWeb has established itself as a premier tool for marketers, researchers, and businesses aiming to gauge their online presence or assess the competition.
What could possibly be causing this steep traffic decline? One theory could possibly be that users are simply accessing GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 services from alternate sources. Bing would appear to be essentially the most obvious candidate but this doesn’t appear to be the case, as traffic for Bing is down but appears to be maintaining barely higher than OpenAI.
After all there are many AI platforms which are competing with ChatGPT, either not directly and even by utilizing ChatGPT APIs to supply their very own services. For instance, users who wish to make use of an AI writing generator could possibly be turning to Jasper AI. Other notable services which are offering generative AI include the start-up You.com. Nonetheless, even these firms together shouldn’t be impacting the OpenAI numbers so significantly.
Even Google Bard which was released in February 2023, and Meta Llama 2 which was released in July 2023, still should not have large consumer facing applications that could possibly be siphoning traffic away from OpenAI.
For all the discussions around OpenAI and the brand new Bing being a Google killer, it still appears to be the case that users enjoy a search engine that prioritizes linking to web sites versus a pure generative AI experience. Google seems fairly unaffected by OpenAI, yet less Bing.
Google may even want to think about these numbers before introducing too many AI features that completely replace the search results page that folks have turn into accustomed to.
Other problems with OpenAI could possibly be the steep price tag. $20 a month for users in North America, and Europe may not seem steep, but for users in most of Africa, and Asia, it could be considered an unaffordable luxury. OpenAI also suffers from a poor user interface. Unlike Google and Bing, you can’t simply type in a one word URL and land on a search bar, using the platform is all the time several clicks away.
Users may additionally be exhausted with the next notification for a big percentage of their queries:
While there are methods across the September 2021 training set limitations, it requires using plug-ins, a process which will not be obvious to users who are usually not immersed on the earth of AI. The concept of plug-ins in itself requires a somewhat technical background to grasp, and this extra layer of complexity is perhaps alienating a big segment of society.
Ultimately, it could simply be that with all the hype around Generative AI, that it was inevitable that there can be a drop in interest and traffic. In any case, in keeping with Amara’s Law, The principles for AI are not any different, the state of the industry is exponentially growing in keeping with Ray Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns, and this short-term traffic dip could possibly be meaningless within the larger context of how AI will transform society.