ChatGPT Statistics 2026: Users, Work, News and Search Clicks

How many people use ChatGPT? In the US, 44% of adults said they use it in Pew Research Center's February 2026 survey, up from 34% who had ever used it a year earlier. Pew changed the question wording between the two years, so read the rise as a direction rather than an exact jump.

Worldwide, the biggest figure comes from OpenAI's own researchers: 700 million people a week by July 2025. That's a company number, published with a Harvard economist as an NBER working paper, and I've labelled it that way. Below you'll find who uses ChatGPT, what they use it for, how it's showing up at work and in the news, and what AI answers are doing to clicks from search.

Last checked 12 November 2026.

Adoption among American adults and teens

• 44% of US adults say they use ChatGPT, up from 34% the year before (question wording changed) (February 2026 data). Source: Pew Research Center.
• 34% of US adults said they had ever used ChatGPT (2025 data). Source: Pew Research Center.
• 49% of US adults, about half, reported using AI chatbots of any kind (2026 data). Source: Pew Research Center.
• 57% of US adults under 50 use ChatGPT, against 28% of those aged 50 and older (2026 data). Source: Pew Research Center.
• 58% of US adults under 30 said they had used ChatGPT (2025 data). Source: Pew Research Center.
• 52% of US adults with a postgraduate degree and 51% with a bachelor's degree only had used ChatGPT, against 18% with a high school degree or less (2025 data). Source: Pew Research Center.
• 26% of US teens aged 13 to 17 said they use ChatGPT for schoolwork (2024 data, published January 2025). Source: Pew Research Center.
• About one in four US adults used AI chatbots daily (2026 data). Source: Pew Research Center.

How big ChatGPT has grown worldwide

The scale figures below come from OpenAI's own data, written up with Harvard's David Deming. They're the most detailed numbers available, but they're the company's, so they're named here rather than linked. The Reuters Institute figures are from an independent online survey in six countries: Argentina, Denmark, France, Japan, the UK and the US.

• 700 million people were using ChatGPT each week, sending 18 billion messages a week, about 10% of the global adult population (July 2025). Source: OpenAI Economic Research and Harvard, NBER Working Paper 34255.
• More than 2.5 billion messages a day were being sent to ChatGPT (July 2025). Source: OpenAI Economic Research and Harvard, NBER Working Paper 34255.
• Almost 350 million logged-in weekly active users used ChatGPT after its first two years (2024 data). Source: OpenAI Economic Research and Harvard, NBER Working Paper 34255.
• 34% average weekly use of ChatGPT across six countries, up from 22% (2026 data). Source: Reuters Institute.
• 51% of people in the same six countries used standalone AI systems weekly, up from 34% a year earlier (2026 data). Source: Reuters Institute.

What people ask it to do

• 49% of ChatGPT messages are Asking, 40% are Doing and 11% are Expressing, based on a privacy-preserving sample of consumer conversations (2025 data). Source: OpenAI Economic Research and Harvard, NBER Working Paper 34255.
• More than 70% of consumer ChatGPT messages are now non-work, up from 53% (2025 data). Source: OpenAI Economic Research and Harvard, NBER Working Paper 34255.
• Nearly 80% of ChatGPT conversations fall under Practical Guidance, Seeking Information and Writing (2025 data). Source: OpenAI Economic Research and Harvard, NBER Working Paper 34255.

Chatbots in the workplace

Two of these cover AI chatbots or AI in general rather than ChatGPT alone, and I've said so on each line. The Census Bureau also changed its AI question in late 2025, so its older business figures aren't comparable with these.

• 28% of employed US adults use ChatGPT for work, up 20 percentage points in two years (2025 data). Source: Pew Research Center.
• 38% of employed US adults use AI chatbots (not only ChatGPT) for tasks at work (2026 data). Source: Pew Research Center.
• 45% of US workers with postgraduate degrees use ChatGPT for work, and over a quarter of all US workers do (2025 report). Source: OpenAI, citing Pew Research Center (company report).
• 17% to 20% of US businesses used AI in any business function (December 2025 to May 2026 data). Source: US Census Bureau.
• 39.7% of US Information-sector businesses used AI, against a national rate of 19.8% (data to 3 May 2026). Source: US Census Bureau.
• 52% of work-related ChatGPT messages from people in management and business jobs are Writing (2025 data). Source: OpenAI Economic Research and Harvard, NBER Working Paper 34255.

Getting news from AI chatbots

• 10% of people across the markets surveyed used dedicated AI chatbots such as ChatGPT for news each week, up from 7% a year earlier (2026 data). Source: Reuters Institute Digital News Report.
• 16% of under-35s used AI chatbots for news (2026 data). Source: Reuters Institute Digital News Report.
• 42% of people who use AI chatbots for news say they always or often click through to the original sources (self-reported) (2026 data). Source: Reuters Institute Digital News Report.
• 2% of US adults get news often from AI chatbots such as ChatGPT or Gemini, and 7% sometimes (2025 data). Source: Pew Research Center.

Britain's slower uptake

• 4% of UK respondents used AI chatbots for news weekly, the lowest of any market surveyed (2026 data). Source: Reuters Institute Digital News Report.
• 33% of adults in Great Britain, around one in three, said they hadn't knowingly used AI (any AI, not only ChatGPT) in the past 12 months (June 2026 data). Source: Office for National Statistics.

AI summaries, clicks and citations

If you publish online, this group matters most. Pew's study tracked the real browsing of 900 US adults, so it shows what people did rather than what they said they did. For the wider picture on AI answers and search, see my AI search statistics.

• 18% of Google searches in Pew's panel of 900 US adults produced an AI summary (March 2025 data). Source: Pew Research Center.
• 8% of visits with an AI summary led to a click on a traditional result, against 15% of visits without one (2025 data). Source: Pew Research Center.
• 1% of visits to pages with an AI summary included a click on a link inside the summary itself (2025 data). Source: Pew Research Center.
• 26% of pages with an AI summary ended the browsing session, against 16% with traditional results only (2025 data). Source: Pew Research Center.
• 33% drop, a third, in Google organic search traffic to over 2,500 sites globally between November 2024 and November 2025 (the Reuters Institute says a link to AI is possible but not proven) (2025 data). Source: Reuters Institute.
• More than 60 percent of news citation queries got incorrect answers across eight AI search tools, including ChatGPT search (March 2025 test). Source: Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Columbia University.

My own site as a test case

These are my own figures, from my AI SEO case study and taken from Google Search Console and GA4. Between January and October 2026, my own site went from 1,322 Google clicks a month to 25,510, a 19.3x increase, and from 32 visits a month sent by AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Copilot to 7,192. ChatGPT visits went from 29 in January to 6,083 in October.

In a test across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews on 20 October 2026, my name or one of my pages came up in 8 of the 25 answers, up from 4 twelve days earlier. By September, AI assistants sent 19% of all visits to my site, up from under 2% in July, and ChatGPT alone sent 91% of those AI visits (Google Analytics 4, from my AI search research). The first AI citations on non-navigational queries appeared 8 weeks after the schema and reference files were complete, as I wrote up in my AI citation case study.

Headline ChatGPT figures side by side

Measure	Figure	Year	Source
US adults who use ChatGPT	44%	2026	Pew Research Center
US adults who had ever used ChatGPT	34%	2025	Pew Research Center
US adults under 30 who had used ChatGPT	58%	2025	Pew Research Center
Employed US adults using ChatGPT for work	28%	2025	Pew Research Center
ChatGPT weekly users	700 million	July 2025	OpenAI Economic Research and Harvard (NBER)
ChatGPT messages per day	more than 2.5 billion	July 2025	OpenAI Economic Research and Harvard (NBER)
Consumer messages that are non-work	more than 70%	2025	OpenAI Economic Research and Harvard (NBER)
US businesses using AI	17% to 20%	Dec 2025 to May 2026	US Census Bureau
People using AI chatbots for news weekly	10%	2026	Reuters Institute
Great Britain adults not knowingly using AI in 12 months	33%	June 2026	Office for National Statistics
Searches with an AI summary (US panel)	18%	March 2025	Pew Research Center
Clicks on a traditional result, AI summary vs none	8% vs 15%	2025	Pew Research Center

Short answers to common ChatGPT questions

What share of US adults have used ChatGPT?

Pew found 44% of US adults said they use ChatGPT in February 2026, up from 34% in 2025, though the question wording changed between years.

How many people use ChatGPT each week?

OpenAI Economic Research reported 700 million weekly users in July 2025, sending more than 2.5 billion messages a day.

What do people mostly use ChatGPT for?

More than 70% of consumer messages are non-work, and Practical Guidance, Seeking Information and Writing make up nearly 80% of conversations.

How many people use ChatGPT for work?

Pew found 28% of employed US adults used ChatGPT for work in 2025, and the Census Bureau found 17% to 20% of US businesses used AI between December 2025 and May 2026.

Do AI summaries in Google reduce clicks?

In Pew's March 2025 browsing study, people clicked a traditional result in 8% of visits with an AI summary against 15% without one, and clicked the summary's own links in 1% of visits.

How this page was checked

An original source here means the body that ran the survey or holds the data: Pew Research Center, the Reuters Institute, the US Census Bureau, the Office for National Statistics, OpenAI's researchers and the Tow Center at Columbia. Every figure was matched against the text of the page it came from. Independent sources are linked; company-published figures, including OpenAI's, are named but not linked. Last checked 12 November 2026.

If an organisation publishes newer data, I'll update the line rather than add a second number.

If you'd like help getting your own business cited in answers like these, my AI SEO services page explains how I work.