- ChatGPT is now fielding 2.5 billion prompts a day
- In comparison, Google gets 14 billion daily searches
- People are increasingly turning to AI instead of search engines
If you use ChatGPT on a daily basis, you’re certainly not alone. According to Axios, ChatGPT users now send more than 2.5 billion prompts a day to the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, showing how incredibly popular it has become over the last few years. Of those numbers, 330 million daily prompts are thought to come from users based in the US, Axios reports.
Although we don’t know whether ChatGPT is actively searching the internet for answers in response to those prompts (or instead relying on its training data), the figure could be worrying reading for search giant Google. That’s because people are increasingly turning away from Google and heading to the best AI tools for answers to their queries.
Google, by comparison, doesn’t share its daily search figures, but its parent company Alphabet recently revealed that the search engine gets roughly five trillion queries per year.
That translates to about 14 billion daily searches – still some way ahead of ChatGPT, but perhaps not unassailably so.
Rapid growth
What’s all the more impressive about ChatGPT’s search figures is the rapid growth it’s undergone since December 2024.
Back then, Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT maker OpenAI, said that the platform received about one billion prompts a day. That means it’s more than doubled its usage in around eight months.
The question remains, though, whether ChatGPT’s current model is economically sustainable for OpenAI. The report from Axios highlights that the “vast majority of the platform’s more than 500 million weekly active users” are using the free version of ChatGPT, meaning OpenAI is only generating income from a small subset of users.
And given there are claims that even the paid edition of ChatGPT is struggling to make money, securing so many daily searches might not be enough for OpenAI in the long run – at least in its current format.
Still, there’s no doubt that the company has undergone rapid expansion even in just the last year, as the daily prompt numbers attest. With Google looking nervously over its shoulder, search engines might soon look very different.