ChatGPT Search Queries Hit 20% of Google Search Volume, OpenAI Says

OpenAI says ChatGPT now handles search-like queries at roughly one-fifth the volume of Google Search. That figure comes straight from Adam Fry, OpenAI's ChatGPT consumer product lead, in an interview with Alex Kantrowitz published November 3, 2026. It's a vendor claim, not an independent measurement — but the growth numbers attached to it are large enough that search marketers should pay attention.

"ChatGPT's volume of search-like queries is now roughly one-fifth the volume of queries of Google," Fry said. He added: "ChatGPT has gone from one billion to 1.2 in just the last two months." That's 1.2 billion weekly active users, a jump of 200 million in about eight weeks — or, put differently, roughly 100 million new users arriving every 30 days.

How fast is that growth?

Fry himself called the pace remarkable given the product's age. "It's a pretty amazing statistic when you think about it, mainly because we started just about a year and a half ago," he said.

The user math is simple. Two hundred million added users in two months works out to about 3 million new users per day. Voice interaction is scaling too — voice now reaches 250 million weekly users, according to Fry's figures shared in the same interview and summarized by SEO consultant Glenn Gabe.

Takeaway: this is vendor-reported data, so treat the exact ratios as directional — but the trajectory is confirmed by OpenAI's own product lead on the record.

What counts as a "search" inside ChatGPT?

This matters for anyone comparing the numbers to Google. Fry defined it plainly. "Every time you ask a question and go search the web, that's a search," he said.

So the 20% figure covers only queries where ChatGPT actually hits the live web, not the full universe of chat prompts. Fry explained what drives those web lookups:

• People, places and things. "What we've seen over the last year is people have grown into all these other topics. Things like you're looking up a person or people or a place or a thing, and it requires up-to-date information. That's a key element."
• Finance and health queries. "Another big part is finance questions or health questions, where you really want to make sure it's up-to-date information that's quite factual, and we'll do a web search for those questions."

That query mix — entity lookups, finance, health — overlaps heavily with high-commercial-intent Google categories. Publishers in those verticals are the ones most exposed to any traffic shift from traditional search to chat-based answers.

Is ChatGPT search bigger than Bing?

If the 20% claim holds, then yes — by a wide margin. Kantrowitz noted in the same thread that Bing holds about 5% of search share. ChatGPT's claimed search volume would be roughly four times that.

Glenn Gabe flagged the implication directly on X: "So it's bigger than Bing now? Hmm..." His summary post also collected the headline numbers — 1.2 billion weekly active users, 200 million added over two months, search volume at roughly 20% of Google's, and voice at 250 million weekly users.

There's one tension worth noting. Google maintains its own search volume is at an all-time high. Both claims can be true simultaneously — ChatGPT growing fast while Google's absolute query count still climbs — but it means the 20% ratio reflects OpenAI's growth more than any measured decline at Google.

Takeaway: on OpenAI's numbers, ChatGPT is now the second-largest search-like surface, well past Bing — though the comparison rests on self-reported definitions of "search."

What should publishers watch next?

The numbers to track are the 1.2 billion weekly active users, the 200 million added in two months, and the ratio to Google's volume. Watch whether OpenAI's web-search share shows up in referral logs for finance and health content, since Fry named those as the categories most likely to trigger a live web search. And watch for independent measurement — the 20% figure is OpenAI's own arithmetic, and third-party confirmation has not yet appeared.