ChatGPT is no longer a chatbot that some people use. According to OpenAI's own numbers, shared on 2 November, it is now a weekly habit for 1.2 billion people — and the questions they ask it are starting to rival the world's biggest search engine.
The numbers OpenAI shared
Adam Fry, OpenAI's consumer product lead for ChatGPT, gave the figures at an OpenAI event in New York on 2 November, in a conversation reported by Big Technology and covered by The Verge and Search Engine Journal:
- 1.2 billion weekly users — up from 1 billion roughly two months earlier.
- Search-like queries at about 20% of Google's volume — for every five searches run on Google, roughly one now happens inside ChatGPT.
- 1.5 billion images created per week by ChatGPT users.
- 250 million people a week use voice input or voice conversations.
What counts as a "search" here?
Fry's definition matters. A "search" is any question that makes ChatGPT go and look things up on the web — asking about a current person, a place, a price, or the news. Simple tasks the model can answer from its own knowledge, like defining a word, do not count. So this is not chatbot chatter; it is people deliberately using ChatGPT the way they used to use a search box.
The honest caveats
These are OpenAI's own figures, shared at OpenAI's own event. The company did not publish how it estimated Google's query volume, and no independent firm has checked the 20% comparison. It also measures questions asked, not traffic sent to websites — and there the picture looks very different. A September study by BrightEdge, cited in coverage of the announcement, credited Google with 86.9% of website referrals, against just 1.9% for all AI services combined. In other words: people may ask ChatGPT a fifth as many questions, but Google still sends websites almost all of their visitors.
Why this matters to you
Two things can be true at once: Google is still the front door of the web, and a second front door is now wide open. If you run a website, a shop or a channel, your content increasingly needs to be findable — and quotable — inside AI answers, not just on a results page. And if you simply use these tools, the habit shift is already yours: asking a chatbot first is now what a billion-plus people do every week.
ChatGPT is free to use at chatgpt.com — the search features Fry described are built into the normal app, no separate product needed.
Sources: Big Technology (interview with Adam Fry, 3 November 2026), The Verge and Search Engine Journal, reporting OpenAI's figures from its 2 November event; BrightEdge referral study as cited by Mezha.
