ChatGPT has reached a new traffic milestone, but the latest figures point to a more complicated story than simple growth. The chatbot is now one of the most visited destinations on the Internet, while the sites it cites receive only limited referral traffic in return.
A Record Month With Slower Momentum
According to data from Similarweb, ChatGPT saw 3,905 billion visitors in February 2025. That was a new record for OpenAI's chatbot, but the month-to-month increase was only 1.44% above January's numbers.
The longer-term picture still shows major expansion. Compared with February 2024, ChatGPT's traffic was up 137%. That combination matters: the service is still far larger than it was a year earlier, even as its short-term growth has nearly stalled.
The traffic scale has also changed ChatGPT's position among major websites. It now ranks fifth among desktop websites worldwide and seventh when desktop and mobile traffic are counted together.
ChatGPT's paid user base has also expanded. The service reportedly ended 2024 with 15.5 million paying subscribers, compared with 5.8 million at the start of the year.
Deepseek Is Growing, But ChatGPT Remains Far Ahead
The source data also compares ChatGPT with Chinese rival Deepseek. Deepseek has shown strong growth, but the gap in daily website visits remains large.
In January, Deepseek recorded 6.2 million daily website visits. ChatGPT recorded 117.5 million during the same period.
That comparison shows why ChatGPT remains the central reference point in consumer AI traffic. Competitors may be expanding, but ChatGPT's website audience is still much larger based on the figures cited.
High Usage Does Not Mean High Referral Traffic
The most important tension is not only how many people use ChatGPT. It is what happens after users receive an answer.
Similarweb data says ChatGPT generates little outbound traffic. In the U.S., over the past six months, Reuters received 50,900 referrals from ChatGPT, the highest total among news providers. The New York Post followed with 42,800 referrals, while The New York Times received 31,600.
Other major publishers saw similarly modest referral numbers. The top 10 news sites combined, including the Wall Street Journal with 27,400, Forbes with 26,200, and Business Insider with 23,900, received fewer than 300,000 total referrals over six months.
Those numbers are small beside ChatGPT's overall reach. A service can attract billions of visitors while sending only a limited share of users onward to the websites behind the information.
Why Source Links Matter
OpenAI is not primarily a search engine, and the company has formed multiple media partnerships to improve its sourcing. Even so, the traffic pattern creates pressure on the relationship between AI answer tools and source websites.
A recent study found that 96 percent of AI answer engine users never click on source links. That behavior creates two connected problems.
- Users may not review original content, making it harder to verify potentially incorrect information.
- Services such as ChatGPT search and Google's new AI search risk undermining the traditional web ecosystem.
The concern is straightforward. If users get the answer inside an AI product and rarely click through, publishers may receive less direct benefit from being cited. The citation can be visible, but the visit may never happen.
The Web Traffic Question Ahead
ChatGPT's February 2025 figures show a platform with enormous reach and slower recent growth. Its position in global website rankings confirms that AI chatbots are no longer a niche destination.
But the referral data shows that reach does not automatically flow back to the open web. For news providers, even top placement among ChatGPT referrals still produced relatively low traffic over six months.
That is why the traffic gap matters. ChatGPT can be both a major entry point for information and a weak source of visits for the publishers whose work supports parts of that information flow.
The result is a new balance for AI search, source links, media partnerships, and web traffic. ChatGPT's audience is massive, but its ability or willingness to send users back to original sources remains limited based on the Similarweb figures cited.