Worldwide traffic for the popular artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT has witnessed a decline from the month of May to June, suggesting a reduction in interest in the AI assistant tool developed by OpenAI. 

According to data estimates from the traffic analytics site Similarweb, desktop and mobile web traffic for ChatGPT dropped by 9.7% in June. In addition, the site's unique visitors and the amount of time users spend on the site have also declined by 5.7% and 8.5% respectively. In the United States, the recorded month-on-month decline in the website’s traffic was 10.3%.

Despite the decline in traffic, the website is still ahead of Google’s Bard, Microsoft’s Bing and another competitor called Character AI, another popular AI-powered chatbot.

Preliminary data on ChatGPT's traffic performance against Bing, Character AI and Bard. Source: Similarweb

As the data was released, some argued that the reason behind the drop may be due to users of the website being students who are currently on their summer break and the AI chatbot’s novelty starting to wear off. 

On the other hand, a community member disputed the reasons behind the drop as it did not include the traffic taken from the AI chatbot’s recently-released iOS application. According to the Twitter user, there could simply be a “change in how ChatGPT is accessed.”

On May 18, OpenAI officially launched ChatGPT’s mobile application for iOS. The firm initially rolled out the app in the United States and promised to expand the release to other countries in the following weeks.

Meanwhile, Lighting Labs, the development firm behind the Bitcoin Lightning Network has announced tools for AI to send and receive Bitcoin (BTC) on its layer-2 solution. The firm released the toolkit with the aim of helping make payments faster, cheaper and easier for developers working on AI-focused projects.

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