July 5 (Reuters) – ChatGPT, the wildly popular AI chatbot launched in November, saw monthly traffic to its website and unique visitors decline for the first time ever in June, according to analytics firm Similarweb.

Worldwide desktop and mobile traffic to the ChatGPT website decreased by 9.7% in June from May, while unique visitors to ChatGPT’s website dropped 5.7%. The amount of time visitors spent on the website was also down 8.5%, Similarweb data shows.

OpenAI did not immediately respond to request for comment.

ChatGPT set off a frenzied use of generative AI in daily tasks from writing to coding and reached 100 million monthly active users in January, two months after its launch.

It is the fastest-growing consumer application ever, and now boasts over 1.5 billion monthly visits, one of the top 20 websites in the world.

For instance, ChatGPT has far surpassed Bing, the search engine run by Microsoft (MSFT.O) which uses OpenAI’s technology.

A few ChatGPT competitors, including Google’s (GOOGL.O) Bard chatbot, have been launched in the past few months. Microsoft’s search engine Bing also provides chatbot powered by OpenAI to users for free.

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