ChatGPT search is 20% of Google's volume, OpenAI says

ChatGPT search volume is now roughly one-fifth of Google's, according to OpenAI. Adam Fry, ChatGPT's consumer product lead, said it at an OpenAI dinner in New York on Monday, in a fireside chat with Alex Kantrowitz of Big Technology. 9to5Google picked it up Tuesday. The number has a lot of give in it. The direction does not.

What actually happened

Fry's definition of a search is narrow and useful: a prompt that needs current information and triggers a web search. Looking up a person, a place, a product, a finance or health question. In his words, roughly anything a user "would have traditionally gone to a traditional search engine for." Writing and coding help do not count.

Other numbers from the same conversation, per Big Technology:

• ChatGPT went from 1 billion to 1.2 billion weekly active users in 60 days.
• Voice, counting dictation and spoken conversation, has 250 million weekly active users.
• Users generate 1.5 billion images a week.
• ChatGPT's separate Chat and Work modes will be merged. The toggle goes away.

The caveats matter. Fry did not say where OpenAI got Google's volume figure. Google has said it handles more than 5 trillion searches a year, so one-fifth would be a very large number, and nobody outside OpenAI can check it. Fry also told reporters, as relayed by 9to5Google via The Verge, that most people "do not seem to mind ads" in ChatGPT and that OpenAI "could be doing this more." Read that as a roadmap.

Why ChatGPT search matters for your business

If one in five search-shaped questions now goes through ChatGPT, a meaningful slice of your customers are asking a model about your category instead of typing it into Google. The model answers from pages it can crawl and cite. If it cannot read your site, you are not in the answer. We covered the measurement side in AI search visibility tooling. Here is the plumbing side, which is free:

1. Allow the right crawler. OpenAI's bot documentation says search inclusion is governed by OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt, not GPTBot and not ChatGPT-User. Many sites blocked everything with "OpenAI" in the name in 2024. Check yours. OpenAI says changes take about 24 hours to register, and publishes the crawler's IP ranges at openai.com/searchbot.json.
2. Grep your server logs for OAI-SearchBot. If it has never visited, that is your answer.
3. Make pages answerable. One question, one page, the answer in the first 100 words, price and availability in schema.org markup. Models cite pages that state the fact plainly.
4. Measure referrals. ChatGPT sends traffic with chatgpt.com as the referrer. Build the segment in your analytics this week so you have a baseline before the holidays.

Then decide on ads with data. ChatGPT ads already run on your product feed. Organic citation is the part you can still earn.

Sources: Big Technology, 9to5Google, OpenAI crawler docs.