Google Starts Losing Ground as Users Switch to Its Rival

Google’s dominance of the global search engine market is facing growing pressure from OpenAI. ChatGPT use for finding up-to-date information has surged and is now equivalent to around 20% of Google’s total search volume.

The rapid growth was disclosed by ChatGPT Consumer Product Lead Adam Fry in an exclusive interview with Alex Kantrowitz in New York, US.

“Search-like queries on ChatGPT are now roughly one-fifth (20%) of Google’s search volume. That is an astonishing figure, given that we only began rolling out our web search feature intensively about a year and a half ago,” Fry said, as quoted by Big Technology on Wednesday (4 November 2026).

The 20% figure marks a shift in the global search technology landscape. By comparison, Microsoft’s Bing currently has around 5% of the search engine market. This suggests that the volume of AI-based searches on ChatGPT has already surpassed that of conventional search engines such as Bing.

ChatGPT reaches 1.2 billion weekly users

ChatGPT’s exponential growth at Google’s expense has been supported by a surge in weekly active users. In just the past 60 days, its user base has risen from 1 billion to 1.2 billion.

“ChatGPT users have increased by 200 million in the past two months. That means around 100 million new users every 30 days. The growth is massive,” Fry said.

Changing user behaviour is a key factor behind ChatGPT’s growing challenge to Google. Whereas two years ago people used ChatGPT mainly to help write text and produce code, searches for real-time information now account for a large share of user activity.

People increasingly prefer to ask ChatGPT directly about important subjects such as financial information, health advice, and profiles of people or places where they need accurate, up-to-date facts.

“Fundamentally, the things people used to search for on traditional search engines such as Google are now increasingly being left behind in favour of going directly to ChatGPT,” Fry said.

The ChatGPT ecosystem is also growing through image generation, which produces 1.5 billion images a week, and voice mode, which now has 250 million weekly active users.