ChatGPT continues to dominate, but this Google AI tool is picking up steam fast

With the generative AI craze in full bloom, OpenAI's ChatGPT use is surging with monthly visits reaching almost 4 billion. But that's not the only AI service that's been on fire.

Overall traffic to ChatGPT's website has shot up more than 100% this year compared with 2023, according to new stats from Similarweb. Last month, the site saw another month of double-digit growth with the number of users rising by 17.2% over September and 116% over October of 2023. For the month, ChatGPT enjoyed 3.7 billion visits across the world.

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Similarweb said that by early 2023, ChatGPT had already become one of the largest global websites since its launch in November 2022. Growth stalled briefly in mid-2023, but since then, the site has been setting records, capturing 2.2 billion visits in May of this year and 3.7 billion last month.

ChatGPT's growth in context

To put the growth in context, ChatGPT now has more users than Google Chrome, as spotted by DigitalTrends. Around 3.45 billion people in the world now use Google's browser, based on statistics from DemandSage. Further, Chrome took almost 16 years to attain that level of growth, while ChatGPT achieved it in around two years.

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Beyond its sheer popularity as an AI tool, ChatGPT has grown through innovation. Over just the past few months, OpenAI has upgraded its core algorithm, added more functionality to the main ChatGPT service, and embedded a search engine into the ChatGPT interface. ChatGPT is also now accessible as its own dedicated domain (chatgpt.com) rather than as a subdomain of OpenAI (openai.com/chatgpt).

But ChatGPT isn't the only AI game in town. The growing popularity of generative AI has been spilling over into other services.

The other AI tool seeing record growth

NotebookLM, Google's AI-powered note-taking service, has also seen a surge in growth. The number of monthly users jumped by 300% in September, followed by 201% in October.

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Launched in July 2023, NotebookLM gradually gained an audience, eventually seeing a steady stream of users in September and October of that year. The service aims to help you collect notes, documents, web pages, and other sources for research purposes. Tapping into AI, you can then ask NotebookLM to analyze and summarize the different sources and even chat about your research.

NotebookLM sounds like an ideal platform for students and other researchers. But Similarweb said that the service has caught on for its ability to create podcast-style AI summaries of any type of data. Even if you don't intend to use the generated audio for a podcast, you may still find this a helpful way to view a summary of collected documents and other sources.

How other AI tools stack up 

What about other AI tools? The ones cited by Similarweb haven't enjoyed the growth in users seen by ChatGPT and NotebookLM. But they have no reason to complain.

Microsoft's dedicated Copilot website saw its traffic grow by 87.6% in October, reaching 64.9 million visits. At least some of that growth was triggered by Microsoft redirecting Bing chats to the Copilot site.

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Last month, Perplexity tallied 90.8 million visits, a gain of 25.5% from the prior month and 199.2% from October in 2023. Over the same time, visits to Claude AI hit 84.1 million, up 25.5% from September and 395% from the previous October.

Finally, Google's Gemini site attracted 291.6 million visits last month, up 6.2% from September and 19% from the previous October.