Sensor Tower: ChatGPT iOS app downloads and Bing app downloads in the US were down 38% MoM in June 2023; Bank of America: visits to ChatGPT were down ~11% MoM
Kif Leswing / CNBC :
Context & Ripple Effects
This was the first hard-data crack in the ChatGPT growth story: Sensor Tower put June's US download drop for both the ChatGPT iOS app and the Bing app at 38% MoM, while Bank of America's own measurement showed site visits down ~11% — a number Similarweb would keep confirming with further monthly declines into August. The two readings matter because they capture different funnels: new-user acquisition (downloads) versus habitual use (visits).
What followed split the narrative. Traffic kept sliding, but Appfigures' revenue tracking showed paid conversion accelerating anyway, and years later Apptopia's share data reframed the whole episode as the start of a competitive erosion rather than a fad dying out.
First-order effects
- OpenAI's consumer-growth momentum stalled in its biggest market at exactly the moment the free product had no new launch to ride, forcing the company to defend a usage curve rather than extend one.
- Microsoft's Bing app, whose download surge had been almost entirely ChatGPT-driven, lost its acquisition engine overnight — the 38% figure hits Bing as hard as OpenAI.
Second-order effects
- With volume flattening, monetization became the proof point: subscription revenue climbed month after month even as visits fell, shifting the story from user counts to willingness-to-pay per user.
- A cooling US install base opened the door for rivals — Google's Gemini among them — to compete on the second wave of adopters rather than the first, a dynamic that eventually showed up as measurable share loss.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, consumer AI is an engagement-and-retention business, not a viral-download business: the eventual scoreboard is share of usage and paid conversion, which is what Apptopia's later market-share tracking measures and what showed ChatGPT's US dominance eroding as Gemini and Grok scaled.
- Growth migrates to markets still in first-adoption phase — India, where ChatGPT later ranked No. 1 by downloads in a record-spending quarter — leaving mature markets to compete on retention while emerging ones supply the volume.
The trend: Consumer AI apps are transitioning from novelty-driven download spikes to a retention-and-monetization contest, with early-adopter saturation in the US giving way to international growth and multi-player share competition.