OpenAI says ChatGPT now handles roughly a fifth as many searches as Google

OpenAI says the volume of search-like queries in ChatGPT has reached roughly one-fifth, or 20%, of the volume of queries Google handles. Adam Fry, the company’s ChatGPT consumer product lead, gave the figure on the evening of Nov. 2 during a fireside chat at an OpenAI-hosted dinner in New York City. The claim is OpenAI’s own, rests on its own definition of a search, and comes with no disclosed Google baseline.

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Fry offered it as evidence that people have started handing questions to a chatbot that were once typed into a search box. The number landed a little more than two years after ChatGPT’s search feature debuted, and it arrived while Google is defending its dominant position against rivals that barely existed in the category two years ago.

Adam Fry’s definition of a search

The wording matters more than the percentage. In the transcript posted by Big Technology, whose Alex Kantrowitz interviewed Fry, Fry described a search as anything a user would traditionally have taken to a traditional search engine. Search Engine Journal’s account of the dinner adds that OpenAI counts each question that sends ChatGPT out to the web as one search, in Fry’s words a case where the person asks a question and the assistant goes and searches.

That is a broad net. Fry said people now use ChatGPT to look up people, places and things that need current information, and for finance and health questions that trigger a web lookup. A single conversation can contain many such prompts, and Kantrowitz asked whether each prompt counts as its own query. The answer sits behind the newsletter’s paywall, so the public text does not settle it.

The unstated Google baseline behind the ratio

Neither OpenAI nor Fry said which Google figure sits in the denominator, what period the comparison covers or which regions are included, as Search Engine Journal points out. 9to5Google, which first carried the story to Google-focused readers, notes that the unspecified source for Google’s volume leaves the 20% with a lot of wiggle room and describes the number as staggering, a characterization that belongs to the site and not to OpenAI.

Gizmodo’s coverage attempted the arithmetic. Using Google’s reported 16 billion daily searches, it estimated that one-fifth would equal about 3.2 billion ChatGPT interactions a day, then pointed out that the definition is loose because ChatGPT reaches for the web on most prompts, so nearly any question could qualify. Gizmodo also noted that Google still holds more than 90% of the search market when AI tools are excluded, in line with the roughly 90% global share listed for Google Search from StatCounter.

For scale, 9to5Google notes that Google Search has long dominated the category while Microsoft’s Bing has held a single-digit share. A newcomer reporting one-fifth of the leader’s volume would therefore be a large shift if the measure were comparable, which is exactly what the missing baseline and the elastic definition make impossible to confirm from outside the company. Referral data tells a different story, according to Search Engine Journal: counted by clicks sent to websites, Google remains far ahead of ChatGPT.

Ads, personalization and Google’s response

Fry did not stop at volume. According to The Verge’s report on the event, as relayed by 9to5Google, he said most people do not seem to mind ads inside ChatGPT, and he indicated that OpenAI could be running more of them. He also said people really love the product’s personalization and its sense of who they are. Usage growth and revenue are separate questions, and ads are the lever Fry pointed to for closing the gap between them. Gizmodo’s roundup of his other figures lists 1.2 billion weekly active users, about 1.5 billion images generated each week and about 250 million people using ChatGPT Voice.

Gizmodo also flagged what Fry left out. He gave no current count of paying subscribers, and the most recent public figure is 50 million, a base made up largely of monthly plans that can be cancelled at any time.

The 9to5Google write-up links the claim to pressure on Google. It points to the Oct. 29 report about Google’s stock drop and the expansion of ads in AI Mode and argues that the company is facing lower monetization as it pushes AI deeper into Search, while OpenAI has a monetization problem of its own to solve.

ChatGPT’s search feature itself is not new. OpenAI launched it on Oct. 31, 2024, and 9to5Google pairs the new figure with that date to show how far use has grown in two years. Gizmodo adds that Fry’s other attempts at Google-like products, SearchGPT and ChatGPT Atlas, reportedly drew little interest, which suggests the growth came from search folded into the chat window rather than from standalone products.

Whether the one-fifth ratio survives a stricter definition is the open question. Fry gave no daily query count for ChatGPT and no Google comparison period, and Kantrowitz’s question about counting every prompt in a conversation, the point on which the ratio most depends, has no answer in the public record. Until OpenAI publishes the underlying counts, the one-fifth figure is best read as the company’s description of its own momentum, delivered by a named executive in front of an invited audience, and not as an audited share of the search market.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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