ChatGPT's volume of search-like queries is now roughly one-fifth the volume of Google's, consumer product lead Adam Fry said at an OpenAI-hosted dinner in New York on Monday night, in a fireside chat with Big Technology's Alex Kantrowitz published November 3. Fry's definition is narrow: a search is a user question that makes ChatGPT look something up on the web — current information about people, places or things, plus some finance and health questions. OpenAI did not disclose which Google baseline it divided into, and no independent firm has checked the comparison.

The same conversation put fresh numbers on ChatGPT's scale: 1.2 billion weekly active users, up from 1 billion over the last two months at roughly 100 million a month; 1.5 billion images created a week; and 250 million weekly users of voice input, counting dictation and voice conversations. Gizmodo noted the framing would make ChatGPT the world's second-largest search engine by volume — and that such numbers are exactly what a company says publicly ahead of a planned IPO.

Treat the growth timeline with some care: Fry described the jump from 1 billion to 1.2 billion as happening over the past two months, but The Verge was already reporting the 1.2 billion figure on September 29, so the timing of the increase is unclear. The one-fifth figure is OpenAI's own estimate using its own definition — a company claim about query volume, not a measured share of the search market.