OpenAI Says ChatGPT Search Is Now About a Fifth of Google Volume, and Voice Has 250 Million Weekly Users

OpenAI says ChatGPT's search traffic has grown to roughly one-fifth of Google, that 250 million people now use its voice features each week, and that the app added 200 million weekly active users in the past two months.

The figures came from Adam Fry, who runs ChatGPT's consumer product, during a fireside chat at an OpenAI dinner in New York on Monday night, in an interview published by Big Technology. "The growth is just going big," Fry said, describing a climb from 1 billion to 1.2 billion weekly active users in 60 days, roughly 100 million in each of the past two months.

The search comparison is the more consequential claim. Fry said ChatGPT's volume of search-like queries is now about one-fifth of the volume Google handles, a share reached in roughly a year and a half of shipping a search product. For scale, third-party estimates have long put Bing at around 5% of the search market. Fry defined the metric simply: every time a user asks something that triggers a web lookup, that counts as one search, which makes the comparison sensitive to how each company counts a query.

Voice is the other surprise. Fry put combined weekly active users of voice input, meaning dictation plus full voice conversations, at 250 million, about a fifth of the user base. He credited the GPT Live models, which added what OpenAI calls backchanneling and interruptibility: the model can be talked over, and it acknowledges being talked over, the way a person does. Voice users tend to stay voice users, he said, and OpenAI concedes it could do more to surface the feature.

The company also says users create about 1.5 billion images inside ChatGPT every week. OpenAI had already put the base at 1.2 billion weekly users when it made GPT-6 the default across every tier in early October, so what is new here is the rate of change and the search comparison rather than the headline number.

All of these are company-reported figures with no external audit, and the search number in particular is not a like-for-like market share. Google counts queries across Search, Maps, YouTube and Assistant; ChatGPT counts prompts that happen to need the live web. Treat the one-fifth claim as an order of magnitude, not a measurement.

What it means: the consumer chatbot is not saturating, and the fight has moved onto the layer OpenAI spent a year insisting it was not competing in, which is search. That matters for the advertising business far more than for the model business, because ad revenue scales with query volume, and query volume is the one number OpenAI has now planted a public marker on.