OpenAI says ChatGPT search volume equals about 20% of Google's
Adam Fry, consumer product lead for ChatGPT at OpenAI, said on Monday, November 2, at a company-hosted dinner in New York that ChatGPT's search-like queries now run at roughly one-fifth of Google's query volume. Fry made the remark in a fireside chat with Alex Kantrowitz, whose Big Technology newsletter published the account. The 20% figure is OpenAI's own estimate, and the company has not released the data behind it. In the same conversation Fry said weekly active users rose from 1 billion to 1.2 billion in about 60 days, and that users create about 1.5 billion images per week.
OpenAI counts a search whenever a prompt causes ChatGPT to go to the web for an answer. The company has not said how many search-like queries it handles, whether a long conversation counts as one search or several, or where its Google baseline comes from. Applying the 20% ratio to Google's last disclosed figure of more than 5 trillion annual searches would put ChatGPT above 1 trillion search-like queries a year, but the two companies may not count the same thing.
Fry also argued that the ability to keep context across a conversation is why people use ChatGPT for search, and he said the 20% ratio does not mean ChatGPT holds one-fifth of the search market. For context, Nadella put Bing's share near 3% in 2023 antitrust testimony, while the interview put it around 5%.
Why it matters
For founders, a single assistant reaching search-scale query volume shifts where discovery happens. Products that rely on referral traffic or on search intent may find answer engines taking more of the early research step, which could leave fewer clicks for the sites and tools downstream. Ahrefs has reported that Google still sends far more traffic to websites than ChatGPT does, so the referral picture is uneven.
For operators and investors, the larger base is the upside, since a product built inside ChatGPT can reach an audience at search scale. The risk sits in measurement. Neither OpenAI nor Google publishes conversational query volume, ad load or click-through rates that advertisers can benchmark, so plans and valuations that lean on these numbers should be tested against independent data.
Key points
- 1Adam Fry, ChatGPT's consumer product lead, gave the figure at an OpenAI-hosted dinner in New York.
- 2Weekly active users rose from 1 billion to 1.2 billion in about 60 days, according to Fry.
- 3OpenAI counts any prompt that sends ChatGPT to the web as a search and has not published its underlying data.
- 4Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella cited Bing's search share near 3% during Google's 2023 antitrust trial.
- 5SEOClarity estimates ChatGPT's search volume at about 7.5% of Google's, or roughly 375 billion queries a year.
