In February 2025, OpenAI’s ChatGPT reached a new milestone, attracting a staggering 3.905 billion visitors, according to data from Similarweb. This marks the highest monthly traffic to the AI chatbot, though growth has slowed, with only a 1.44% increase over January. Year-over-year, however, ChatGPT continues to show impressive growth, with a 137% rise in visitors compared to February 2024.
Despite the plateauing growth, ChatGPT has cemented its place among the internet’s most-visited sites. It ranks 5th globally for desktop traffic and 7th overall, combining both desktop and mobile visits. Currently, it accounts for 1.86% of global web traffic, making it one of the top 10 websites worldwide, though it still lags far behind Google and other tech giants.
The chatbot’s success has also translated into a significant increase in paid subscribers, with ChatGPT finishing 2024 with 15.5 million paying users—up from 5.8 million at the start of the year. While Chinese competitor Deepseek is growing, it still falls short of ChatGPT’s dominance. For instance, Deepseek’s 6.2 million daily visits in January were dwarfed by ChatGPT’s 117.5 million visits during the same period.
However, despite its massive user base, ChatGPT’s traffic-sharing with other websites remains minimal. In the past six months, top U.S. news outlets received just a trickle of referrals from ChatGPT. Reuters, the leader, saw only 50,900 referrals, while The New York Times garnered 31,600. Even combined, the top 10 news sites received fewer than 300,000 total referrals. This trend highlights a key challenge: while ChatGPT’s traffic continues to soar, it generates little outbound traffic to source sites.
This pattern raises concerns, as users rarely click on the original content cited by the AI, with 96% of users not following source links, according to a recent study. This lack of traffic sharing has implications for content verification and could disrupt the traditional web ecosystem. OpenAI has entered multiple media partnerships to improve its sourcing, but the effectiveness of these efforts remains to be seen.
In conclusion, while ChatGPT continues to break traffic records, its minimal referral traffic poses a challenge for the broader web ecosystem. As AI-driven tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI search become more prevalent, questions about how these technologies interact with traditional web sources will continue to grow.
