According to the latest statistics from Similarweb, ChatGPT's visits hit a new high in February 2025, reaching an astonishing 390.5 billion times, a slight increase of 1.44% from January. Although the month-on-month growth rate slowed down, it still achieved a significant growth of 137% compared with the same period in 2024, showing strong development momentum.
This continued growth trend has led ChatGPT to continue to climb in the global website rankings. Currently, it ranks fifth in global desktop websites and seventh in the ranking of integrated desktop and mobile traffic. It is worth noting that ChatGPT has accounted for 1.86% of global network traffic, with monthly visits exceeding 4 billion, successfully ranking among the top ten websites in the world. Although there is still a gap compared to tech giants such as Google, this achievement has demonstrated its strong influence.
Judging from user data, the number of paid users of ChatGPT achieved a leapfrog growth in 2024, surged from 5.8 million at the beginning of the year to 15.5 million, showing strong commercialization potential. In contrast, although its Chinese competitor Deepseek showed a certain growth momentum, there is still a significant gap in daily visits of 6.2 million in January compared with ChatGPT's 117.5 million visits in the same period.
However, Similarweb's data reveals a phenomenon worthy of attention: Although ChatGPT has a huge user base, it generates an extremely scarce outbound traffic. The volume of recommendations received by mainstream American media from ChatGPT in the past six months, with Reuters topped the list with 50,900 times, while the New York Post and the New York Times received 42,800 and 31,600 recommendations respectively. Even if the total recommendations of the top ten news websites are added together, it will be less than 300,000 times in six months.
A new study found that up to 96% of AI answer engine users have never clicked on the source link, which raises two key questions: first, users cannot verify the accuracy of information provided by AI; second, services such as ChatGPT search and Google's new AI search may have an impact on the traditional network ecosystem.
Although OpenAI has established partnerships with multiple media to improve its content source, it is still rare for users to click on original content. This minimum traffic sharing is causing widespread concerns in the industry, and how to balance the interests of AI services and content providers has become an important issue that needs to be solved urgently.