OpenAI says ChatGPT now handles roughly one search-style query for every five that Google handles. It is a striking claim for a product that added web search about a year and a half ago, but it comes from OpenAI alone, and the way the number is counted matters a great deal.
What OpenAI said
Adam Fry, OpenAI's consumer product lead for ChatGPT, gave the figure to Alex Kantrowitz of Big Technology at an OpenAI-hosted dinner in New York on 2 November 2026. He said ChatGPT's volume of search-like queries is now roughly one-fifth the volume of Google's, and called it a pretty amazing statistic. He tied the growth to a shift in how people use the assistant, toward longer sessions that carry context rather than one-off lookups. Fry also said ChatGPT's weekly active users grew from 1 billion to 1.2 billion in about two months.
How OpenAI counts a search
According to reporting on the exchange, every question that triggers a web search counts as a search, rather than each conversation. A single long chat could therefore add many searches. OpenAI has not said which Google figure it compared against, what time period it covers or which countries are included, and it has not published the underlying data. Google itself does not publish a global daily search count that would allow a clean comparison.
What outside estimates say
- SEO software company Ahrefs estimated in February that ChatGPT receives about 12% of Google's search volume, but it counted only the kinds of searches people traditionally do on Google, so it is not directly comparable.
- Another estimate, from seoClarity in October, put ChatGPT's search-equivalent share at about 7.5%.
- Google still sends about 190 times more traffic to websites than ChatGPT does, according to a figure cited by Crypto Briefing, so volume and clicks tell different stories.
Ads and Google's response
OpenAI said its ads business passed $1 billion in annualised revenue within 200 days and that more than 100,000 advertisers have used it. Fry said most people do not seem to mind ads in ChatGPT, and that OpenAI could be doing more of them, as reported by The Verge. Google has acknowledged lower monetisation as it adds AI to its own search results, according to 9to5Google.
Why it matters
For publishers, businesses and creators who depend on search traffic, including across Africa, the shift matters for two reasons. If more people ask AI assistants instead of searching, fewer will click through to websites. And whoever controls the answer controls which sources are shown. The honest reading of today's claim is that AI search is growing quickly and becoming a real competitor, but that the 20% figure is OpenAI's own and is not an independent measurement of market share.
Sources: Big Technology interview with Adam Fry (November 2026); The Verge; 9to5Google; iGeeksBlog; AI Weekly; Search Engine Journal via Free Press Journal; Crypto Briefing.
