OpenAI says ChatGPT now handles a fifth of Google's search volume

On Monday 2 November 2026, Adam Fry, OpenAI's consumer product lead for ChatGPT, said the volume of search-like queries in ChatGPT is now "roughly one-fifth the volume of queries of Google". He said it in a fireside chat with Alex Kantrowitz at an OpenAI-hosted dinner in New York, which Big Technology published on 3 November. The Verge and 9to5Google reported the same figure from the event.

The numbers Fry gave

According to Big Technology, Fry said:

• ChatGPT went from 1 billion to 1.2 billion weekly active users in the last two months, "roughly 100 million users in 30 days, and another 100 million in another 30 days";
• its volume of search-like queries is roughly one-fifth of Google's;
• users create 1.5 billion images a week;
• voice, counting dictation and spoken conversations, has 250 million combined weekly active users.

He also said OpenAI plans to merge ChatGPT's Chat and Work modes, so the toggle at the top of the app will go away.

What counts as a search

The 20% figure depends on how a search is defined. Fry told The Verge that OpenAI counts a search whenever a user's query results in a web search, as opposed to tasks like defining a term or a simple how-to explanation. 9to5Google quotes him: "Every time you ask a question and go search the web, that's a search."

In the Big Technology interview, Fry described the queries that trigger a web search: looking up a person, a place or a thing that needs up-to-date information, and finance or health questions where the answer has to be current and factual. He said people first came to ChatGPT, about two years ago, for writing and coding help, which "wouldn't be things that you really search for".

Three caveats come with the number:

• Fry did not say where OpenAI's figure for Google's search volume comes from, The Verge notes.
• It compares query volume, not the number of people using each product, and it is OpenAI's own analysis.
• When Kantrowitz asked whether that made ChatGPT several times larger than Bing, Fry answered with the user growth figures instead, according to Big Technology.

For scale, The Verge recalls that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said during Google's 2023 antitrust trial that Bing had about 3% of the search market after more than a decade of trying.

Ads in the answer

The same event covered advertising. Fry told reporters that "ads have not negatively impacted the product or the usage of the product" and that "most people do not seem to mind ads in the product", The Verge reports. He added: "Ads have maybe shown us that we could be doing this more, actually."

The Verge notes that OpenAI announced last month it would start showing images of sponsored products and services in ChatGPT, rather than only a company's name, logo and link, and that the company sees ads as a path to profitability ahead of an IPO potentially slated for early next year.

Fry also described what OpenAI calls "Intelligent UI", visual and interactive interfaces inside a chatbot answer. "That's where the future of this technology goes. You're talking to a canvas," he said, as quoted by The Verge.

Why it matters

By OpenAI's own figure, Google still handles five times as many queries. But a growing share of questions that used to start in a search box now start in a chat window, and OpenAI's product lead says ads there could grow. For anyone buying attention online, AI assistants are now a place where people look for products, places and answers, not only a place where they write and code.

9to5Google adds that Google itself acknowledges "lower monetization" as it pushes AI further into Search. Both companies are moving answers and ads into the same interface. OpenAI's 20% comes without a published method, so the next useful data point would be one that does.