OpenAI’s ChatGPT is handling more than 2.5 billion user prompts each day, doubling since December’s milestone of 1 billion daily queries, according to internal figures shared with Axios.
Of those requests, roughly 330 million originate in the US, with the remainder spread across markets from India and Europe to Africa and Latin America.
ChatGPT’s surge in usage, up from 300 million weekly active users in December to over 500 million by March, underscores the platform’s growing ubiquity.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Axios that daily active users have more than quadrupled in the past year, and he estimates that roughly 10% of the global population now interacts with ChatGPT. At the current trajectory, ChatGPT is on pace to process nearly 900 billion prompts annually.
While Google’s parent, Alphabet, does not publish daily query counts, industry analysts peg Google Search at approximately 14-16 billion searches per day, meaning ChatGPT’s volumes are swiftly approaching those of entrenched search engines.
Unlike traditional web search, which returns lists of links, ChatGPT generates conversational answers, code snippets, summaries and content on demand, a model that appeals particularly to younger users, developers and knowledge workers.
AI Expands Beyond the Chat
ChatGPT’s growth coincides with a flurry of product innovations designed to deepen user engagement. In mid‑July, OpenAI launched the ChatGPT Agent, an autonomous assistant capable of orchestrating complex, multi‑step tasks, ranging from browsing the web and managing calendars to auto‑generating slide presentations.
Reuters has also reported that OpenAI is preparing a Chromium‑based AI browser to compete directly with Google Chrome by embedding conversational interfaces into everyday web navigation.
The fusion of large language models with multimodal inputs, text, voice, image and code, has facilitated tighter integrations with productivity suites such as Microsoft Office, third‑party applications and voice assistants.
This ecosystem expansion signals OpenAI’s ambition to make conversational AI a central interface across both consumer and enterprise workflows.
Implications for Search and Beyond
Analysts believe that if ChatGPT maintains its current growth rate, it could surpass Google Search in daily query volume for certain informational and transactional tasks, particularly among demographics that favour instantly synthesised responses over traditional search results.
Such a shift would represent one of the fastest technology adoption curves in recent history and may redefine user expectations for information retrieval and digital assistance.
As OpenAI scales its infrastructure to support this explosive demand, questions around data privacy, content accuracy and ethical deployment will intensify.
For now, ChatGPT’s ascent illustrates the transformative potential of AI chatbots to reshape the digital landscape, and the tension between speed of innovation and the challenges of governance.
