OpenAI Says ChatGPT Now Runs a Fifth as Many Searches as Google

OpenAI says people now run about one search through ChatGPT for every five they run on Google. The figure is OpenAI’s own, and it hasn’t shown the working. Two outside estimates put the share far lower, at 7.5% and 12%.

The claim came from Adam Fry, who leads ChatGPT’s consumer product, at an OpenAI dinner for journalists in New York on Monday. “ChatGPT’s volume of search-like queries is now roughly one-fifth the volume of queries of Google,” he told Alex Kantrowitz, who published the conversation in Big Technology on Tuesday.

Fry also said ChatGPT grew from 1 billion to 1.2 billion weekly users in the past two months, and that 250 million people a week use its voice features.

How OpenAI counts a search

The number depends on a definition. Asked whether a long chat counts as one search or many, Fry said: “Every time you ask a question and go search the web, that’s a search,” according to Search Engine Journal. So one conversation with five questions that send ChatGPT to the web counts as five searches.

Fry did not say where the Google figure came from, The Verge reported, or which period and countries were measured. Google doesn’t publish a daily query count. Its last public figure was more than five trillion searches a year, based on 2025 data.

What outside estimates say

Search-data firm seoClarity estimated on 28 October that ChatGPT handles about 1.24 billion search-like messages a day, against a modelled 16.44 billion Google queries. That is about 7.5%. seoClarity calls this a modelled estimate, not a measured market share.

In February, SEO tool maker Ahrefs put the figure at about 12%. It also found that, across 76,000 websites, Google sent about 190 times more visitors than ChatGPT. People ask ChatGPT questions, but they rarely click through to the sources.

That gap matters for publishers, who are already fighting over how AI tools use their work, as in the European case over Google Gemini we covered this week.

Why it matters

If the 20% figure holds, ChatGPT is already handling more searches than Bing, which Microsoft has run for more than 15 years. For anyone who runs a website, the number to watch is not ChatGPT’s searches but the clicks it sends, and that number is still small.