OpenAI says ChatGPT now handles about 20 percent of Google's search volume

What OpenAI claimed

OpenAI says the volume of search queries run through ChatGPT now equals 20 percent of the volume run through Google. Adam Fry, OpenAI's consumer product lead for ChatGPT, made the announcement at a press event on Monday, and repeated the figure to Big Technology at an OpenAI-hosted dinner in New York the same night.

Fry defined a search as any time a user inputs a query that results in a web search, as opposed to tasks like defining a term or a simple how-to explanation. He did not specify the source of the Google search volume number, which means the one-fifth figure rests on OpenAI's own comparison of its internal analytics against an unspecified estimate of Google's traffic.

The claim matters because it is the first time OpenAI has put a number on its search ambitions against Google, the market leader. It also sets up the ad business OpenAI is building toward as it approaches a possible IPO.

The growth numbers behind it

Alongside the search figure, OpenAI said ChatGPT has grown from 1 billion to 1.2 billion weekly active users in about 60 days, adding roughly 200 million users in two months. Fry told Big Technology the pace was "roughly 100 million users in 30 days, and another 100 million in another 30 days."

The company also said 250 million people now use voice input weekly, including dictation and conversations with voice mode, and that users create 1.5 billion images with ChatGPT per week. Fry said the voice growth is incremental rather than just a novelty: "We're seeing them use voice input day to day in their daily life."

Keeping the framing honest: weekly active users and search volume are different things. A user who opens ChatGPT once a week counts fully in the active figure, and search queries are one behavior inside the product, not the whole product.

How the comparison stacks up

At 20 percent of Google's volume, ChatGPT would still be far behind: Google's absolute query volume is enormous, and Fry's own framing was that ChatGPT is "roughly one-fifth the volume" of Google, a long way from overtaking it.

For context, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said during Google's 2023 antitrust trial that Bing had about 3 percent of the search engine market share after more than a decade of trying. OpenAI's claim, if accurate, would put ChatGPT well above that bar in a much shorter time, though the two measurements are not identical: market share and query volume are calculated differently.

OpenAI likely uses Microsoft Bing for a significant part of its searches along with its in-house search index. How much of the volume is Bing-powered versus OpenAI's own index is not disclosed, which matters for anyone trying to decide whether this is a new search engine or a very large wrapper.

What OpenAI wants from this

The announcement is aimed at investors and advertisers as much as users. OpenAI has defended its path to profitability through ads, particularly as it approaches an IPO potentially slated for early next year. The company announced last month that it would begin showing images of sponsored products and services in ChatGPT rather than just a company name, logo and link.

Fry told reporters the ads had not produced a lasting backlash: "Ads have not negatively impacted the product or the usage of the product," he said, adding that "most people do not seem to mind ads in the product." He also said, "Ads have maybe shown us that we could be doing this more, actually."

OpenAI is also pushing the interaction model it calls Intelligent UI, an interface where answers come back as interactive canvases rather than static text. Fry described that as the direction of travel: "That's where the future of this technology goes. You're talking to a canvas."

We covered the Intelligent UI push when ChatGPT added it, and OpenAI has been building the advertising business to match.The widened gap between Google and Meta in ad revenue growth points at how far search monetization still has to go.

What would make the claim real

The missing pieces are independent measurement. OpenAI did not publish a methodology, a sample, or the Google figure it compared against, and Fry did not specify the origin of the Google number. Third-party panels like Similarweb and Statcounter measure search share differently and will be the tests that matter in the coming months.

Watch whether Google responds with its own figures, whether OpenAI reveals a methodology, and whether the growth translates into ad inventory that advertisers actually buy. Search volume is an input; revenue and intent are the outputs that will determine whether this is a genuine shift in how people find information.