Search traffic for ChatGPT is mostly coming from China

trends.google.com

2 pointsIAmGraydon3 comments

As most of you know, ChatGPT has been massively overloaded the last couple of days. This led me to take a peek at Google Trends to see when searches were peaking, and I found that the volume of search traffic coming from China is some 20x that from the US or anywhere else, really. Also strange, traffic in the US peaks around 2-3AM, as seen here:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now%207-d&geo=...

Thoughts on either of these patterns?

maybe because it was down a lot during peak hours and people binged on it at night ?

traffic from china is indeed crazy

Google Search is blocked in China, so anyone using it anyways is using a VPN or some other circumvention mechanism, which likely correlates with interest in stuff like ChatGPT.

Google Trends "interest" does not indicate absolute search traffic but is a measure relative to the normal traffic in a region. (If it were absolute, large population centers would always have the most "interest" in everything.)

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