Why Are Some ChatGPT Plugin Icons Getting Thousands Of Calls A Day When Others Are Not?

As soon as a ChatGPT Plugin user (someone who is a paid Plus subscriber or developer) loads the ChatGPT Plugin Store, ChatGPT does a call to the Plugin’s manifest file to retrieve the icon image URL to where the icon image is stored.

*A Plugin manifest file is a configuration file that provides information and instructions to integrate the Plugin with the ChatGPT language model. It defines the necessary metadata and settings required for the plugin to be recognised and utilized by the ChatGPT system.*

ChatGPT does this icon image call retrieval for all Plugins on Page 1 of the “All” Plugins view, as well as all pages of your “Installed” Plugins.

ChatGPT displays those icons in the browser, specifically the Plugin Store popup.

For each of these icons, the server where the icon image sits will log this call.

If you have deployed a Plugin to the ChatGPT Plugin Store, you can view your server logs to see how many times this icon has been called.

The “All” Plugins view, changes its order every time the Store is reloaded — it doesn’t display Plugins based on how new they are of how popular they are — both of these criteria are displayed in the “Popular” and “New” tabs respectively.

The order is purely random in the “All” Plugins view.

Now, my server logs for all (13 at the time of writing) my plugins are attached as a screenshot.

The first column is the actual calls to each Plugins icon image.

The second column is the projected calls to each Plugins icon image over the next 28 days.

Some of them are really large numbers, whereas others are not.

So, what is the discrepancy?

My guess is:

If we assume (this is total speculation now) that showing on the first page is the total number of Plugins (559 at the time of writing), that is a 0.16% chance (559/8 pages) is 1/74 )or 1.33% chance of a Plugin being on the front page each time a user uses the Plugins tab is being used.

So based on this logic, the lower numbers reflect a combination of 1) being on that first page of the Plugin Store (i.e. randomness, see the explanation from before), or 2) users scrolling through each store page individually, or 3) doing a keyword search within the Plugin store.

The higher numbers reflect actual current Plugin Installs (not uses) — remember an icon image call retrieval for all Plugins only occurs for all Plugins on Page 1 of the “All” Plugins view, as well as all pages of your “Installed” Plugins.