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The website of ChatGPT’s developer — OpenAI.com — is busier than a ticket taker at a Taylor Swift concert.

The home of the (artificial intelligence) AI-rooted automation tool that helps businesses of all kinds do things faster, a resource quickly proliferating throughout proptech, has become one of the fastest-growing websites ever, according to research by Veza Digital, a U.S.-based SaaS Webflow design and performance marketing agency.

Web traffic to the site grew by 54 percent in volume in March 2023, easily the greatest increase of all top-ranking websites worldwide, according to Veza Digital. The website is rapidly approaching one billion visitors per month, jumping 33 positions in the global rankings of the Internet’s 50 most visited websites.

CEO of Veza Digital Stefan Katanic said his team believes openai.com will reach that “unicorn” benchmark faster than any other domain.

“This is indicative of a clear public interest in AI-powered solutions, which legislators are rushing to regulate before it spirals into unchartered territories, like artwork copyright and ethical challenges,” Katanic said. “Debates about AI are divisive, but one thing we can probably all agree on is that AI is no longer the future – it is the present.“

Veza’s measured a total of 847.8 million unique visitors to openai.com in March, which shows a nine-position jump to #18 worldwide. In February, it leapt 24 spots from No. 51 to No. 27.

Every ninth visitor is from the United States, Veza said. There’s little doubt that a good portion of those visits can be traced back to the real estate industry, which continues to search out ways to leverage the prompt-driven bot.

Proptechs particularly are signing up with ChatGPT, Zillow and Redfin being merely a couple of notables. From its basic plugin to deeper integrations, companies are using it to expedite client experiences, create marketing materials and forge listing descriptions.

Rental operations company Zumper announced the product’s use in apartment searches on June 2. Bramlett Residential collects property highlights from sellers and uses them as listing description prompts, demonstrating how something that’s been done for years can be completed faster.

PlanetRE integrated ChatGPT with its CRM to help agents create social media content, while brokerage Real embedded it as an assistant within its internal, agent-facing transaction management solution, reZEN. Real Estate Webmasters, Doss, Addressable, Rezora and search site LandOnEarth have also enhanced their services in various ways using the popular AI tool.

The integration of AI, especially ChatGPT, is now inevitable. The more visits the openai.com and its trophy product receives, the most it’ll know about buying and selling homes.

However, rapid onboarding of ChatGPT is not without risk said Molly McKinley, Inman contributor and founder of industry marketing company Redtail Creative.

“Artificial intelligence is pulling and weaving together content from sources that have already been created digitally,“ she wrote. “This presents interesting challenges regarding plagiarism, ownership, licensing and accuracy.”

Technology coach and proptech analyst Mike Delprete used ChatGPT to catalog years of website insights, enabling content from 2018 to be accessed via chatbot.

At this point, the industry expert is advising everyone to take the onset of AI, namely ChatGPT, with a “healthy bit of skepticism.”

“We’re at the same point we were at 20 years ago, with Zillow coming on the scene,” he said in a talk shared with Inman Intel. “What’s happening now is the basic, proof-of-concept stuff, people are wrapping ChatGPT with a different skin.”

On the whole, though, DelPrete said we can’t afford to be wrong about AI’s impact on the industry. As opposed to the initial cynicism that surrounded Zillow’s capture and capitalization of market and listing data from agents, the industry should be wise to what ChatGPT and its competitors can do, and be prepared for the coming change.

In other words, if someone is surprised by something ChatGPT replaces in their workflow in the coming months (not years), they can’t say the signs weren’t posted in the yard.

There’s already close to a billion of them.

Email Craig Rowe