Number of ChatGPT Users (January 2026)

OpenAI’s ChatGPT took off in record-breaking fashion.

The artificial intelligence chatbot picked up millions of users in a very short space of time.

In this up-to-date article, we’ll explore just how many users the ChatGPT platform currently has.

We’ll also share relevant usage data about the fast-growing AI tool.

Top ChatGPT User Statistics

• In just 5 days, ChatGPT surpassed 1 million users.
• ChatGPT.com gets approximately 5.6 billion visits per month
  
• Users send 2.5+ billion prompts each day
• Around 47% of ChatGPT's social media traffic comes via YouTube.
• Around 18% of ChatGPT's users are American.
• About 42% of ChatGPT users are under the age of 25.
• Though growth slowed at the end of 2025, OpenAI hopes to reach 1 billion users in 2026.

How Many ChatGPT Users Are There?

Based on November 2025 data from Semrush, ChatGPT ranks #4 in the world's most visited websites.

Meanwhile, OpenAI.com ranks #38, receiving well over 865 million monthly visits. 

• According to Brad Lightcap, OpenAI's Chief Operating Officer, ChatGPT had 400 million weekly users in February 2025.
• Mary Meeker's AI report claimed that it had reached 800 million weekly users by April 2025. A September 2025 report from OpenAI claimed "700 million active weekly users".
• In July 2025, Sam Altman confirmed that users send 2.5 billion prompts each day.

Here's a look at ChatGPT's growth. 

Month	Weekly Users
November 2022	1 million
January 2023	30 million
November 2023	100 million
December 2024	300 million
February 2025	400 million
October 2025	700-800 million
November 2025	810 million

Sources: Reuters, Semrush, CNBC, The Verge, Techerati, DigitalInformationWorld, Bond, Axios, OpenAI

ChatGPT User Demographics

In early 2025, our research suggested that 64.32% of ChatGPT users are male, and 35.68% are female.

But usage among women is growing.

In September 2025, a study from OpenAI’s Economic Research team and Harvard economist David Deming confirmed that, "In January 2024, among users with names that could be classified as either masculine or feminine, 37% had typically feminine names. By July 2025, that share had risen to more than half (52%)."

More than 40% of its users are under the age of 25. 

ChatGPT Usage: Home vs Work

Exploding Topics conducted a survey into the way people use AI at home and at work.

We found that ChatGPT is the most popular AI tool for personal and workplace usage, closely followed by Google AI Mode.

Among those who use AI tools at home, 83.27% use ChatGPT.

At work, we found that 70.8% of workplace AI users are using ChatGPT.

What kind of tasks are people using ChatGPT for? 

The top three usage patterns in AI include:

• Writing (40%): Editing, communication, document creation.
• Practical Guidance (24.1%): Tutoring, how-to advice, creative ideation
• Seeking Information (13.5%): Factual queries, recipes, current events

When it comes to writing requests, research shows that most queries are in the realm of editing or modifying the user input rather than creating something new from scratch. 

This suggests people don't use ChatGPT as often for generating textual content from scratch as they do for editing an existing document. 

Our data also shows that writing and editing tasks lead the top use case scenarios for all AI tools (not just ChatGPT) at the workplace.

According to a research paper, the share of technical help (coding, data analysis, calculations) queries in ChatGPT has declined from 18% to 10% from July 2024 to July 2025. 

One likely factor contributing to this decline is the growing number of specialist tools integration with ChatGPT through API. The result is fewer people visiting ChatGPT directly for technical help, but using the models elsewhere with API integrations.

The reverse is happening with multimedia queries. These have grown from 2% to 7%, tracing ChatGPT's improving image generation capabilities over time.

Source: Exploding Topics

ChatGPT's Initial Growth

According to OpenAI, ChatGPT acquired 1 million users just 5 days after launching in November 2022. This made it the fastest-growing application in history until Threads took that crown in July 2023.

By comparison, it took Instagram approximately 2.5 months to reach 1 million downloads. And Netflix had to wait around 3.5 years to reach 1 million users.

Here’s a breakdown of the approximate time taken to reach 1 million users for various online services:

* 1 million backers ** 1 million nights booked *** 1 million downloads

Incredibly, it’s estimated that ChatGPT then went on to hit 100 million monthly active users in January 2023, two months after launch.

To put that into perspective, TikTok took 9 months to reach 100 million users. And Instagram took 2.5 years.

ChatGPT reached 1 million users in 5 days, and 100 million users in two months. It's among the fastest-growing services of all time, hitting major user milestones far more quickly than TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook.

Sources: Statista, Reuters

ChatGPT User Growth

ChatGPT's traffic and usage have skyrocketed since its launch.

Here's how ChatGPT monthly visits progressed over time:

Month	Number of Visits	Change Over Previous Period	Change Over Previous Period (%)
December 2022	264.7 million	-	-
January 2023	683.2 million	↑ 418.5 million	↑ 158.10%
February 2023	1.3 billion	↑ 616.8 million	↑ 90.28%
March 2023	1.9 billion	↑ 600 million	↑ 46.15%
April 2023	2.3 billion	↑ 400 million	↑ 21.05%
April 2024	2.8 billion	↑ 500 million	↑ 21.74%
November 2024	4.8 billion	↑ 2 billion	↑ 71.43%
December 2024	4.8 billion	-	-
January 2025	4.7 billion	↓ 0.1 billion	↓ 2.08%
July 2025	5.2 billion	↑ 0.5 billion	↑ 10.64%
December 2025	5.6 billion	↑ 0.4 billion	↑ 7.69%

If you pay attention, ChatGPT's growth broke the pattern in early 2025. It was the first time that the growth turned negative compared to the previous unit of period for ChatGPT.

Although ChatGPT is continuing to grow once again in terms of its users, the same can't be said for the growth of ChatGPT paid subscriptions. 

This is a challenge for the company, and recent statements from Sam Altman indicate OpenAI is considering multiple additional ways for boosting revenue. Some of these plans include:

• Monetization in video generation with Sora
• New ChatGPT-integrated devices 
• Adult content in ChatGPT 

One thing is clear. ChatGPT will need to innovate considerably if it wants to continue generating revenue in an increasingly saturated generative AI market. 

Whether OpenAI will follow through with some of their stated plans to cover the revenue gap remains to be seen.

Source: Semrush

ChatGPT User Stats

According to Semrush figures in December 2025:

• ChatGPT.com is visited approximately 5.6 billion times each month
• ChatGPT.com has a bounce rate of 39.37%.
• Each visitor views an average of 4 pages per visit
• Each user spends an average of 12 minutes and 41 seconds on the site.

Here’s how ChatGPT compares to other popular websites in terms of monthly visits and user interaction:

Source: Semrush

ChatGPT Traffic

Top Marketing Channels

78.84% of ChatGPT visits are direct. 

Organic search traffic is the second-most popular way to access ChatGPT (10.51% of traffic).

Here’s a breakdown of the most popular ChatGPT marketing channels:

You can see a full journey breakdown of ChatGPT traffic with Semrush's traffic analytics.  

Social Media Traffic

In terms of social media traffic, YouTube is responsible for more than 2 in 5 visits (47%).

Here’s how other social media networks stack up:

Top Keyword Traffic

The most commonly searched keyword is "chatgpt" with 47.86% of the searches per month.

This is followed by "chat gpt" with 31.97% of monthly searches.

Here's a breakdown of the most commonly used keywords that users use to find ChatGPT.

Source: Semrush

ChatGPT Search

When OpenAI launched ChatGPT search, there was speculation that it could eat into Google's market share.

According to the latest SEO statistics, that has not happened yet.

But ChatGPT searches are increasing. And traffic from AI search engines is projected to overtake traffic from organic search in 2028.

It was estimated that ChatGPT received 37.5 million searches per day in 2024, while Google received 14 billion.

Between 2023-2024, the number of Google searches increased by 21.6%, and its market share remains above 90%. 

SEO tracking tools are an essential tool when understanding search traffic from ChatGPT.

Source: SparkToro

Semrush AI Optimization offers insights into:

• Brand sentiment in ChatGPT responses
• Visibility in diferent LLMs
• Share of Voice 

This offers brands a new way to make sure they appear in AI search recommendations. Increasing brand mentions and visibility in ChatGPT search is only going to become more important. 

ChatGPT Subscriptions and Revenue

ChatGPT is free to use.

It has 35 million paying subscribers.

From its paid subscriptions, the company made $2.7 billion in 2024. This is forecasted to reach $4 billion by the end of 2025.

Source: Moomoo

ChatGPT by Region

No one country has more ChatGPT users than the US (16.18%).

Second-placed India (8.71%) has just over half as many ChatGPT users.

Together, the top five countries make up around 37% of all ChatGPT users.

Here’s the breakdown of ChatGPT users by region:

Source: Semrush

ChatGPT by Age

According to YouGov, 17% of 30 to 44-year-olds have used ChatGPT.

Similarly, 15% of 18 to 29-year-olds have used ChatGPT to generate text.

Around 1 in 10 (9%) of 45 to 64-year-olds and 5% of 65+ year-olds use ChatGPT.

However, far more people are aware of ChatGPT:

Looking at AI more generally, people aged 18-29 are actually among the most skeptical of the technology. Original Exploding Topics research found that among this age group, 83.89% wanted to see a pause or reduction in the amount of online content made with AI tools including ChatGPT. 

Sources: YouGov, Exploding Topics

OpenAI Model History

OpenAI launched Generative Pre-trained Transformer 1 (GPT-1) in June 2018.

The first model, called "ChatGPT", was launched in November 2022.

Here's a breakdown of key OpenAI models:

Model	Release Date	Context Window	Max Output Tokens	Knowledge Cutoff	Input	Output	Reasoning
GPT-4.5	2025	128,000	16,384	Oct 2023	Text, Image	Text	No
GPT-o3-mini	2024	200,000	100,000	Oct 2023	Text	Text	Yes
GPT-o1-mini	2024	128,000	65,536	Oct 2023	Text	Text	Yes
GPT-o1	2024	200,000	100,000	Oct 2023	Text, Image	Text	Yes
GPT-4o-audio	2024	128,000	16,384	Oct 2023	Text, audio	Text, audio	No
GPT-4o-mini	2024	128,000	16,384	Oct 2023	Text, Image	Text	No
GPT-4o	2024	128,000	16,384	Oct 2023	Text, Image	Text	No
GPT-4	2023	8,192	8,192	Dec 2023	Text	Text	No

Source: OpenAI, Wikipedia, OpenAI

Future of ChatGPT

ChatGPT’s overnight success has blown previous user growth figures out of the water.

Based on current data, the AI chatbot’s success looks set to continue:

• OpenAI is working on GPT-5, which is due to be released in 2025
• GPT-5 is expected to combine multiple OpenAI models into one
• Users on the free ChatGPT subscription will get unlimited access to GPT-5 when it's available
• OpenAI is rumored to be considering a new paid tier that will cost $2,000 per month
• It's working on its next open-weights model

For more ChatGPT statistics, take a look at:

• Top ChatGPT Alternatives
• Top AI Trends
• Artificial Intelligence Statistics