Chatbots now top some of the internet’s most popular destinations in terms of visitors, overtaking Amazon, X, Reddit, WhatsApp, and Wikipedia since mid-2024.
According to web analytics platform Similarweb, ChatGPT is now the fifth most popular website worldwide in terms of raw visitor numbers, coming just behind Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram as of September 2025.
Though OpenAI’s tool was the only chatbot to overtake the biggest household names, web visits to all leading AI chatbots rose 76% year-on-year, while mobile app sessions grew seven-fold, according to Similarweb. ChatGPT attracted 6.3 billion visitors in September, accounting for 76% of all visits to generative AI platforms. Google’s Gemini took second place, drawing just over a billion users and grabbing 12.57% of all traffic.
No other chatbot attracted a significant share of visitors by itself. China’s DeepSeek brought in roughly 4% of all visitors to gen AI platforms, while tools like X’s Grok and AI search engine Perplexity drew just over 2% each.
The report also detailed how the audience for AI chatbots has diversified over the past two years. In 2023, 61% of chatbot usage came from users aged 18–34. In 2025, that share declined to 53% as adoption accelerated among older age groups. Visitors aged 45 and above now account for nearly 30% of usage.
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Though ChatGPT may still be king of the hill when it comes to chatbots, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reportedly declared a “code red” at the company earlier this week, telling the company to focus its efforts on improving its flagship chatbot’s user experience, according to The Wall Street Journal. Altman’s pleas come as rivals such as Google’s Gemini 3, which rolled out last month, have posted impressive performance on several benchmarks.
Disclosure: Ziff Davis, PCMag’s parent company, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in April 2025, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.
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