ChatGPT Claims to Have Achieved 20% of Google’s Search Volume

Google owns over 90% of the global search engine market share—but that’s only if you don’t count AI tools. According to a report from Big Technology, ChatGPT estimates that it has about 20% of the search volume that Google does, which, by most metrics, would make it the second-largest search engine in the world—though how exactly it quantifies its metrics might give you pause. In an interview with Big Technology, ChatGPT consumer product lead Adam Fry revealed that OpenAI’s flagship product is rapidly becoming Google-esque in size—which is the kind of thing that you’d want to say publicly ahead of a planned initial public offering. Fry’s way of quantifying this is with “search-like queries,” which are kind of an eye-of-the-beholder thing. Fry described it as “basically anything that a user would have traditionally gone to a traditional search engine for, but is now deciding to go to ChatGPT for.” Pressed for a little more specifics, he explained, “Every time you ask a question and go search the web, that’s a search.” Reasonably enough, though, does that mean any time ChatGPT accesses the web to find information, that is a search? Because that is happening basically all the time. Maybe it doesn’t happen for image or video generation, but most other prompts are going to lead to ChatGPT scouring external sources, if only for authority. As Fry points out, there was a period of time where ChatGPT was not able to access up-to-date information and only relied on its training data up to a certain date. That’s no longer the case, so many interactions are search-like. Fry didn’t put a specific number on how many prompts ChatGPT is handling that qualify as search. But we can get a rough estimate: Google reportedly handles 16 billion searches per day, so ChatGPT is claiming to have about 3.2 billion similar user interactions. That’s believable enough, though it’s interesting that ChatGPT’s attempts to make actual Google-like products have kinda tanked. Remember SearchGPT, which was going to be a standalone search engine that just got rolled into ChatGPT? Or ChatGPT Atlas, the company’s Google Chrome-like browser that very quietly got put out to pasture earlier this year after generating very little user interest? Fry was much more willing to put hard numbers on a couple other metrics. For instance, he told Big Technology that ChatGPT now has 1.2 billion weekly active users, including adding about 200 million over the last two months. The company’s models are also reportedly generating about 1.5 billion images per week on behalf of users, and about 250 million people are reportedly using ChatGPT Voice, which allows people to communicate with the AI chatbot by speaking to it—a feature that some TikTokers have made a habit of trolling to pretty entertaining effect. Those figures are pretty big and noteworthy. Also noteworthy, though, is that Fry did not provide a concrete update on how many people are actually paying for ChatGPT. He offered up the most recent public figure, 50 million paying subscribers, and said it has grown but didn’t say how much. Even if they added 10 million subscribers to that figure, the company would still be sitting at about a 5% conversion rate to paying customers—and most of the people are on monthly plans who could cancel or flip to another service at any time. Just another reminder to pay attention to the numbers these companies do share and the ones they don’t.