OpenAI’s ChatGPT is on tempo to succeed in 700 million weekly energetic customers, based on an announcement this week from Nick Turley, VP and head of the ChatGPT app.
The milestone marks a pointy improve from 500 million in March and represents a fourfold bounce in comparison with the identical time final yr.
Turley shared the replace on X, writing:
“This week, ChatGPT is on observe to succeed in 700M weekly energetic customers — up from 500M on the finish of March and 4× since final yr. On daily basis, folks and groups are studying, creating, and fixing more durable issues. Huge week forward. Grateful to the workforce for making ChatGPT extra helpful and delivering on our mission so everybody can profit from AI.”
How Does This Evaluate to Different Search Engines?
Weekly energetic consumer (WAU) counts aren’t usually shared by conventional engines like google, making direct comparisons tough. Google experiences mixture information like whole queries or month-to-month product utilization.
Whereas Google handles billions of searches every day and reaches billions of customers globally, its early progress metrics have been restricted to go looking quantity.
By 2004, roughly six years after launch, Google was processing over 200 million every day searches. That determine grew to 4 billion every day searches by 2009, greater than a decade into the corporate’s existence.
For Microsoft’s Bing search engine, a comparable information level got here in 2023, when Microsoft reported that its AI-powered Bing Chat had reached 100 million every day energetic customers. Nonetheless, that refers back to the new conversational interface, not Bing Search as a complete.
How ChatGPT’s Progress Stands Out
Not like conventional engines like google, which constructed their consumer bases throughout a time of restricted web entry, ChatGPT entered a mature digital market the place world adoption might occur instantly. Nonetheless, its progress is important even by at this time’s requirements.
Though OpenAI hasn’t shared every day utilization numbers, reporting WAU provides us an image of regular engagement from a variety of customers. Weekly stats are typically a extra dependable measure of product worth than every day fluctuations.
Why This Issues
The rise in ChatGPT utilization is proof of a broader shift in how folks discover data on-line.
A Wall Road Journal report cites market intelligence agency Datos, which discovered that AI-powered instruments like ChatGPT and Perplexity make up 5.6% of desktop browser searches within the U.S., greater than double their share from a yr earlier.
The development is even stronger amongst early adopters. Amongst individuals who started utilizing giant language fashions in 2024, practically 40% of their desktop browser visits now go to AI search instruments. Throughout the identical interval, conventional engines like google’ share of visitors from these customers dropped from 76% to 61%, based on Datos.
Wanting Forward
With ChatGPT on observe to succeed in 700 million weekly customers, OpenAI’s platform is now rivaling the size of mainstream client merchandise.
As AI instruments grow to be a main place to begin for queries, entrepreneurs might want to rethink how they method visibility and engagement. Staying aggressive would require methods targeted as a lot on AI optimization as on conventional search engine optimization.
Featured Picture: Photograph Company/Shutterstock
