Adam Fry leads ChatGPT's consumer product at OpenAI, and on Monday night at an OpenAI-hosted dinner in New York, he put a number on the habit shift that's been reshaping the web for two years. According to Big Technology's Alex Kantrowitz, who interviewed Fry at the dinner, "ChatGPT's volume of search-like queries is now roughly one-fifth the volume of queries of Google."
The supporting numbers were no less striking. ChatGPT has reached 1.2 billion weekly active users, up from 1 billion roughly 60 days earlier — "roughly 100 million users in 30 days, and another 100 million in another 30 days," Fry said. "The growth is just going big." Users now generate 1.5 billion images a week; voice, across dictation and spoken conversation, has 250 million combined weekly users; and the Chat/Work toggle is going away as the two modes merge. Fry, a former Googler, said the search behavior took off about a year and a half after ChatGPT could pull in live web information: "It's basically anything that a user would have traditionally gone to a traditional search engine for, but is now deciding to go to ChatGPT for."
Then the asterisk, and it's a big one. "Search-like query" is OpenAI's own definition, and a generous one: every question that triggers a web lookup counts, so one long conversation can add up to several "searches." OpenAI disclosed no method for estimating Google's volume, and no independent firm has verified the comparison. This is not search market share — it's a query-count comparison under a company-chosen definition. And the growth math wobbles: The Verge reported ChatGPT at 1.2 billion weekly users back on September 29, which doesn't fit neatly with Fry's "one billion to 1.2 in sixty days."
But don't mistake a soft number for a soft trend. Nobody serious disputes the direction — and Google's own behavior this week says it feels the pressure. On Tuesday, Google told schools that turning off its AI tools means losing Google Search too, because the two are "deeply integrated," as CNN reported. That's the move of a company defending its core, not coasting.
The line from Fry's dinner that will age best isn't the 20% — it's the migration underneath it. Writing and coding help built ChatGPT; people now go there to look up people, places, finance, health. Google owns the verb. OpenAI just claimed a fifth of it.
— via Big Technology