OpenAI pegs ChatGPT search at one-fifth of Google's volume

ChatGPT's volume of search-like queries is now "roughly one-fifth the volume of queries of Google," OpenAI's consumer product lead for ChatGPT, Adam Fry, said in an interview with Big Technology's Alex Kantrowitz. As The Verge picked up in its writeup, Fry did not say which Google baseline that fraction is being divided into, and his definition of a search sets a specific bar.

"Every time you ask a question and go search the web, that's a search," Fry said, drawing a line between prompts that trigger a web lookup and the writing or coding uses that make up the rest of ChatGPT's traffic. He called the one-fifth number "a pretty amazing statistic" given that OpenAI started building the search product only about a year and a half ago.

In the same conversation, Fry said ChatGPT had climbed from one billion to 1.2 billion weekly active users over the last two months. "ChatGPT has gone from one billion to 1.2 in just the last two months," he told Kantrowitz, framing it as "roughly 100 million users in 30 days, and another 100 million in another 30 days."

Fry tied the search growth to a shift in how people use the assistant: longer, context-carrying sessions rather than the one-off lookups Google is built around. Two of the researchers we track were circulating the Big Technology interview the day it ran.