ChatGPT's Rising Traffic Versus Other Top Websites [Infographic]
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No matter how you look at it, ChatGPT has had a transformative impact on web usage trends, and the broader tech industry as a whole.
Because while generative AI tools in a similar vein to ChatGPT have been in development for years, with Meta, Google, and many others exploring the possibilities of AI tech, no one had launched a user-friendly, conversational AI interface like ChatGPT, and that quickly made the app synonymous with the new tech.
And while other AI models are improving, and likely already surpass ChatGPT in capacity and capability, that first-mover advantage has been huge for the platform, as you can see in this latest overview from Visual Capitalist.
The chart below compares the web traffic data of the top 10 websites in April, as recorded by SimilarWeb.
As per Visual Capitalist:
'The ChatGPT.com site saw a 13% increase in monthly traffic in April 2025, with features like image generation picking up popularity. Meanwhile, other most-visited websites like Google, YouTube, and Facebook all saw their monthly traffic decline in April. Wikipedia saw the sharpest fall at -6.1%, potentially signaling a slowdown in research activity or competition from AI-powered tools like ChatGPT. Social media site X.com (formerly Twitter) followed with a -5.2% change in monthly traffic.'
So even though many other AI alternatives are now available, ChatGPT is still gaining traffic, and becoming a key source of information for many users.
That points to the shifting paths of online discovery, and the rising use of AI, for many purposes.
It's worth considering what that means for user behaviors, and how that relates to marketing approaches.
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Audie Cornish 00:15:36 Yes, oh my gosh, please do. I think I know.I think I know the one you're going to read, actually. Karen Hao 00:15:40 So I start my book with two quotes side by side. And the one from Sam Altman goes like this, "Successful people create companies, more successful people, create countries. The most successful people create religions" and this is in quotations that Sam Altmann is quoting this. "I heard this from Qi Lu, I'm not sure what the source is. It got me thinking though, the most successful founders do not set out to create companies. They're on a mission to create something closer to a religion. And at some point, it turns out that forming a company is the easiest way to do so." And so the thing about this religion that's so interesting is they do not pray to a higher power. They are the ones that believe they're creating a higher power. And Altman, I would say, is sort of like Paul Atreides' mom in Dune. Audie Cornish 00:16:36 I love this reference. Keep it going. Yes. Karen Hao 00:16:40 She was the one that created the myth, that created a religion around Paul Atreides, right? And when people encountered that myth, they didn't understand that it was a creation, so they just believed it. I think that's who Altman is. This is just based on, after doing a lot of reporting and understanding who he is, this is my own conclusion. This is not like I saw some document where he was talking about these things. I think he understood very, very early on in his career, as evidenced by this quote, that to mobilize people, to mobilize extraordinary resources, you have to create a religious fervor around a quest. And he figured out how to create that by evoking this idea of we are going to create this Artificial General Intelligence and to your question of is he a boomer or a doomer? No one really knows. And this was something that was quite interesting when interviewing people for the book, is regardless of how long they had worked with Altman, how closely they had worked with altman, no one could really say what he believes. And if they were doomers themselves. They thought that maybe Altman was more of a they were boomers themselves... Audie Cornish 00:18:03 Meaning that he cared, that he was concerned, but also the implication was, would care about safety and care about these things they're worried about. Karen Hao 00:18:12 Yes. And if they were boomers, they believed that Altman was certainly in their camp and most likely a boomer. And what I realized when I asked people, I would always ask people, what did Sam tell you in this conversation about what he believed and what the company was doing? I realized he always said different things to different people depending on what they wanted to hear. And so ultimately, I think he will choose whether to embody a more boomer ethos or a more doomer ethos based on what is convenient and what he needs to continue mobilizing, not just his employees, but also mobilizing the public, mobilizing regulators, policymakers to move in a direction that is in the best interest of open AI. Audie Cornish 00:19:02 The quote I thought you were gonna read was the one that, was it Paul Graham? Who said this? Somebody said that if you dropped Sam Altman on an island of cannibals and came back in five years, he'd be king. Karen Hao 00:19:16 Yes, that was Paul Graham. Yeah. His mentor. Audie Cornish 00:19:18 I can never unhear that. His mentor said this? Karen Hao 00:19:21 His mentor said this. Audie Cornish 00:19:23 As a compliment? Karen Hao 00:19:26 As a compliment. Audie Cornish 00:19:28 OK, so Karen, I want to move on to something else, which is the way you just described Altman is actually similar to the way people have described Donald Trump. And I'm bringing this up because we are seeing Altman travel in those circles now. Karen Hao 00:19:44 'Mm-hmm. Audie Cornish 00:19:44 In part because of the president's embrace of technology. So just for example, Trump does this three country tour of Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, brings 50 CEOs and I'm watching from my desk on screen and I see Sam Altman there shaking hands. The AI czar is there, David Sachs, he calls it this like game changer in the global AI race. Which the administration thinks like, look, if the US can cement the position before anyone else, they don't have to worry about China, et cetera. But it was just so wild seeing Altman in the court of Saudi Arabia helping make this deal happen, and as we learned in the background reporting, upsetting Elon Musk in the process, who felt like he, that OpenAI was getting more attention than he was. It felt like I was watching a moment where world powers were divvying up something. Yeah. Only those world powers were tech companies. Karen Hao 00:20:52 'Yeah. So, I mean, the reason why I call my book Empire of AI is a nod to this argument that I make in the book that these companies need to be thought of as new forms of empire. And the reason is because empires of old and empires of AI share all the same features. First, they lay claim to resources that are not their own, but they redesign the rules to suggest that it was always their own. So they're scraping the internet saying, this was free for the taking, but people did not give their informed consent to the idea that just because you post on social media, you're suddenly going to be fodder for training models that could potentially restrict your economic opportunity. The empires also exploit labor all around the world, and with these AI companies, that not only refers to the fact that they contract a lot of workers around the that then work in extremely poor conditions to do data cleaning, data annotation, and then content moderation for these companies, but also the fact that these organizations are ultimately building labor-automating technologies. OpenAI's definition of AGI is highly autonomous systems that outperform humans in most economically valuable work. So not only is it exploiting labor on the way in, the product is also exploiting Labor. Audie Cornish 00:22:20 Ah, Karen, okay, that's a lot to unpack, but there are a couple things in there I wanna jump in and ask about. You mentioned the labor part of it. We've been talking about AI scientists and venture capitalists and all the people at the top level, and then I'm reading your book and I'm learning it's data workers in Kenya who are, I don't know what, stripping disturbing content out of the responses. Like, how does this even work? Tell me about the humans in AI. Karen Hao 00:22:51 'There was a part in opening eyes history, as we talked about, when they started shifting from being more research oriented to realizing they needed some kind of commercialization. And that meant placing their text generated generation tool that can spew anything into the hands of millions of users. There have been some really infamous scandals in which companies have done this and then it has been a spectacular failure because then the chat bot suddenly starts saying racist, abusive, toxic things in the hands of those users. And so OpenAI was like, we can't have that happen. We need to build a content moderation filter that we wrap around all of our models so that when a user says something, if the model does start to generate something, the filter blocks it. It never reaches back to the user. And so they contracted workers in Kenya to build this filter. And what these workers did, was they had to day in and day out read reams of the worst text on the internet, as well as AI-generated text where OpenAI prompted models to imagine the worst texts on the Internet. And then those workers had to very carefully annotate into a detailed taxonomy, is this violent content or is this sexual content? Is this extremely graphic violent content? Is this sexual abuse content? And does that involve children? For these workers, we see exactly what happened with the social media era and content moderators in social media. They were left deeply traumatized and it wasn't just the individuals that were left traumatized. It was their communities, their families, people that depended on them, that lost a person that they depended on and these models would not be possible. They would not have the success as products that they do without this labor and it is the most taxing harmful labor and they are paid two dollars an hour. The only justification is an ideological one. It is a belief that underpins all empires that there are superior groups of people that have some nature given or God given right to rule over and subjugate inferior people. Audie Cornish 00:25:11 And this is before we get to the workers in Colombia, right, who are labeling images for AI training, or, and I'm not gonna go down the rabbit hole here, the environmental impact that is required by these data centers. We've talked about that in other contexts and suggest our listeners actually check out Terms of Service, which is our podcast on this stuff, and they've gone into it. But it gets to your point that like, I think we see such a cleaned up version. Of chat GPT, you know, to whatever help you do, kind of like nonsense tasks, that we don't have a real sense of the cost, the human cost. Karen Hao 00:25:50 It's not just the human cost, it becomes a country cost where you literally are being dispossessed of the natural resources and the human resources to develop your country further. I mean that is colonialism and that is the legacy that we still live with. Audie Cornish 00:26:07 We see something similar with a couple countries that have tried to say, like, look, we're going to get in on the AI game and it's cost them. Karen Hao 00:26:14 Led them to repeat the same thing. So I spoke with activists in Chile and Uruguay. They were aggressively trying to fight data center expansion within their countries because the governments thought, we really want the foreign direct investment. We want to welcome these companies in to build these data centers. But then the communities that actually have to host the data centers, and these data center have to use fresh water to cool the overheating of the computers. Both of those countries, when those data centers came in, were experiencing historic droughts. And ultimately, it was in that moment that Google said, okay, we are going to come in and build a data center that now uses the fresh drinking water that you do not get to have. Audie Cornish 00:27:00 There's a recent poll that found that more than 75% of Americans basically want to slow down AI development, to make sure it's done safely or ethically, when they're sort of presented with that option. Do you think there is a version of critical public pressure that could have an effect on this conversation? Karen Hao 00:27:27 Absolutely — 00:27:27 Are you sure? Because when I see the tech people with Trump, you know, getting sovereign wealth money, I'm like, the jig is up. Karen Hao 00:27:37 Is it going to be incredibly hard? Absolutely. But you know, one of the features of empires is that they are made to feel inevitable, but historically every single empire has fallen. So it really is possible. It's just going to take an extraordinary amount of work. And I like to think about the full AI supply chain, you know these technologies, there are all of these ingredients that the companies need to build these models. And they're all of the spaces in which they then have to have access to deploy those models. So the ingredients include the data, they include the land, energy and water for hosting and powering the supercomputers, they include labor, they include talent, they include all of the intellectual property that writers, artists and creators have produced over time. And the spaces in which they need to deploy are schools, businesses, healthcare industry, all of these other types of industries. But one of the things that Silicon Valley has done incredibly well in the last decade is to convince everyone that their resources are in fact Silicon Valley's resources, but we need to remember— Audie Cornish 00:28:53 What do you mean by that? Karen Hao 00:28:53 You know I have friends that will say there's no data privacy anymore whatever they have all of my data anyway so I'll just continue giving them my data That's your resource. You have ownership over that. We have ownership over our data, our land, our energy, our water. We have ownership over our schools, our healthcare system. These are actually collectively owned or individually owned resources and spaces. And these companies actually need, they need access to it. And we are the ones that grant them access to it. Audie Cornish 00:29:28 But we're also told, like, this is gonna cure cancer. This is gonna help us get to Mars. This is going to, like the AI is going, you know, AI is gonna open dot dot dot. Open doors to this or that. And the Industrial Revolution had its benefits. You know what I mean? Like it had its downsides, but it had it's benefits. And I guess the reason why I'm wrestling with this is because, yeah, like I just had this long conversation with Mustafa Suleyman and he's very, like this could really help people, you know? I think like any tool. And then I talk to you and you're just like, power to the people, fight these colonizers. And then, I Google somewhere else and they're like, well, Skynet's coming, so I don't know what to tell y'all. You know what I mean? Like, you're going to be attacked by drones. Find a cave. I hear such conflicting information about how I feel about this industry, and I don't if it's about the technology itself or about the people involved in it. Karen Hao 00:30:23 Here's what I'll say. When Mustafa Suleyman says, it could help people, could is the operative word. And when people say it could be Skynet, could is still the operative word. And what I try to do with my book is say, this is what is literally happening right now. It's not a could scenario, it is the reality. And this reality should be the best evidence that we have in understanding how AI is impacting people now. And how it will continue to impact people in the future, because it demonstrates to us the logic of how this technology is being built and how its gonna work its way through ultimately the fault lines of our society. And right now, it is not looking good. And what I argue is that we need and we can actually turn the ship around, but it cannot be it's too late, there's no role for us. We should just wait for these overlords to hopefully be nice. You know, there are artists and writers that are now suing these companies saying, we don't like the fact that you just trained on our intellectual property. You don't get to do that. No, like this is something that we need to aggressively collectively shape by taking ownership of that data, taking ownership with that land. And I think everyone wants to be in control of it. It's just most people don't know how. And I hope that through reading the book that people will start to figure out how. Audie Cornish 00:31:57 Journalist Karen Hao. Her new book is called "Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's Open AI.". Audie Cornish 00:32:08 The Assignment is a production of CNN Audio, and this episode was produced by an actual person, Lori Galarreta. Our senior producer is Matt Martinez, Dan Dzula is our technical director, and Steve Lickteig is executive producer of CNN audio. We had support from Dan Bloom, Haley Thomas, Alex Manassari, Robert Mathers, Jon Dionora, Leni Steinhardt, Jamus Anderus, Nichole Pesaru, and Lisa Namerow. As always, thank you so much for listening. We know you can spend your time in a lot of other places. Please hit that subscribe button, share with a friend, and we'll talk next week.
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- Forbes
Google Confirms Almost All Gmail Users Must Upgrade Accounts
Change your account now. Your email is under attack. You know this, of course, but Google has just confirmed that 61% of email users have been targeted by attacks. If that sounds alarming, the situation with text messaging is even worse, hitting almost all American phone users. Google warns that more than 60% of U.S. users saw 'an increase in scams over the past year,' with more than half 'personally experiencing a data breach.' While these numbers are 'far from surprising,' Google says, what is surprising is that almost all users are yet to upgrade accounts to make them safer and more secure. Most users, Google says, 'still rely on older sign-in methods like passwords and two-factor authentication (2FA),' despite the push to upgrade accounts to passkeys and social sign-ins, which uses authenticated platforms like 'Sign in with Google.' The situation is slightly more promising with younger users. 'Digitally-native Gen Z users are bypassing outdated security norms like passwords, opting for more advanced authentication tools.' This younger generation is 'more reliant on passkeys or social sign-ins,' albeit they're also more likely to reuse and less likely to change passwords. Google warns 'passwords are not only painful to maintain, but are also more prone to phishing and often leaked through data breaches.' And that's the real issue. 'It's important to use tools that automatically secure your account and protect you from scams,' Google tells users, and that means upgrading accounts now. Google says 'we want to move beyond passwords altogether, while keeping sign-ins as easy as possible.' That includes social sign ins, but mainly it means passkeys. 'Passkeys are phishing-resistant and can log you in simply with the method you use to unlock your device (like your fingerprint or face ID) — no password required.' Adding a passkey to your Google account also means 'you can rely on just your Google Account to log in to your favorite websites and apps — limiting the number of accounts you have to maintain.' Put more simply, because passkeys link to your hardware — primarily your phone, this secure device becomes a digital key for critical accounts. Microsoft has gone further than Google and is pushing for users to delete passwords altogether, given they present an account vulnerability if still in place. While you can't do that with your Google account today, you can avoid using your password and you can change 2FA to remove SMS texts and only use options linked to your devices — an authenticator apps or Google prompts. Upgrade your account today.
