ChatGPT overtakes Wikipedia

ChatGPT is officially clocking more site visits than Wikipedia in the US

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A few weeks ago, a pretty shocking chart about ChatGPT leapfrogging Wikipedia was doing the rounds on social media, leading science and tech site Futurism to declare “we’re so cooked.”

Although the data behind the viral chart came from survey responses compiled by British market insights agency GWI, rather than site visits or page views, the harder data now shows the same result: OpenAI’s chatbot has now overtaken the free online encyclopedia, at least for American users.

According to Similarweb figures, ChatGPT traffic hit a record high in April, as US site visits soared 14% from March to a whopping 780 million. Despite the fact that the figure still pales in comparison to online behemoths like Google, which (as we noted nearer the time) clocked 16 billion visits, it was enough to beat Wikipedia — long seen as one of the go-tos for time-strapped students and people looking to quickly learn a little bit about a lot or fact-check their friends.

Interestingly, Similarweb showed that ChatGPT had fewer than half the number of unique site visitors that Wikipedia notched in April, meaning that the 57.2 million Americans who went to chatgpt․com locked in with the chatbot across ~14 visits each on average.

It’s also worth noting that global data for Wikipedia’s English site shows little notable change in total web traffic — since 2020 the site has averaged 7.55 billion visits. In May it clocked 7.8 billion.