ChatGPT.com passed 1 billion U.S. monthly visits as Bing traffic halved

Search Engine Land published a piece by Andy Chadwick on 4 September 2026 that pulls Semrush's Traffic Analytics data for the most visited U.S. websites as of July 2026 and compares it against the same month a year earlier. The top of the list looks unchanged from a year ago, and the piece argues that the stability itself is the story.

What the top of the list actually looks like

Chadwick reports Google's U.S. traffic up 10.72% year over year and YouTube up 36.6%. The top three sites now generate 54.3% of the top 10's traffic, and the top 10 account for 68.6% of the top 150's total, essentially flat against 68.8% a year ago. Total visits across the top 150 rose 6.1%. The web is concentrating further under AI in these numbers, at the same top addresses.

ChatGPT.com now ranks ninth

The largest single mover in the top 20 is ChatGPT.com, up 48.38% year over year to 1.09 billion monthly U.S. visits, now ranked ninth and ahead of both DuckDuckGo and Bing. TikTok by comparison sits at 573.6 million visits and grew 1.63% over the same window, so the ChatGPT gain is specifically an AI-chat effect rather than a general shift to newer platforms.

The steepest year-over-year decline in the top 20 belongs to Bing, down 50.43%. Chadwick notes that Microsoft has spent three years adding Copilot to Bing and the traffic data suggests the effort still has not increased standalone search share the way Microsoft hoped.

Temu's drop had a policy cause, not an AI one

Temu is the other big decliner, down 28.55%. The article ties the fall to the closure of the "de minimis" tariff exemption on low-value Chinese imports in mid-2025, which removed Temu's pricing advantage in the U.S. market. Chadwick calls this out because it is not an SEO story or an AI story that happened to show up in search traffic; it is a trade-policy story that appeared in the same dataset.

The GA4 gap Chadwick found in his own client data

The piece then walks through a pro-bono publishing site the author consults on. GA4 sessions were up 105%, engaged sessions up 111%, and key events up 80.5% for 1 January to 26 August 2026 against the same window in 2025. On the same report, direct traffic was up 157% and now accounts for over 78% of total visits, up from 62.5% a year earlier. Almost four in five visitors carry no attribution, and that share is growing every month.

Chadwick's reading is that "direct" is the label GA4 attaches to everything it cannot attribute, and that an increasing amount of that unattributed traffic is arriving from links generated inside AI chat interfaces, which routinely strip the referrer data GA4 depends on.

Three dashboards, one story

For a documentation hub, a product page, or a company blog, the practical consequence is that traffic can be flat in Google Search Console, rising inside GA4, and still be losing referral share to ChatGPT and other chat surfaces without any dashboard flagging it. A team that intends to direct content investment for the next quarter needs three separate views open together: impressions and clicks in Search Console, referral and direct trend in GA4, and a track of brand mentions or citations inside AI answers. Any one view on its own is now compatible with three different underlying stories.

Source

Original reporting: The big winners and losers in U.S. website traffic over the past year by Andy Chadwick, Search Engine Land, 4 September 2026.