ChatGPT races toward 700M weekly users - what just sparked the leap?

Key Details

• Nick Turley, VP and head of the ChatGPT app, writing on X at 16:11 UTC on 21 May 2025, said the service is “on track” for 700 million weekly active users.
• The figure covers activity across the web, iOS, Android, and the ChatGPT API.
• OpenAI last reported 500 million weekly active users during its 14 March 2024 developer day.
• The weekly active base has climbed roughly 200 million per month since March.
• OpenAI reports weekly - not daily or monthly - active users to emphasize sustained engagement. Paid ChatGPT Plus totals were not disclosed.
• Datos estimates AI search tools captured 5.6 percent of U.S. desktop queries in April 2025.

Background

ChatGPT launched publicly in November 2022 and surpassed 100 million monthly users by January 2023 - one of the fastest adoption curves recorded by Sensor Tower and Similarweb. Official iOS and Android apps arrived in mid-2023, eliminating browser friction and introducing subscriptions that unlock GPT-4 access.

During OpenAI’s first developer day in March 2024, the company unveiled custom GPT creation and voice features and cited 500 million weekly users.

Competitors remain smaller by their own disclosures. Microsoft said Bing Chat logged 100 million daily searches in March 2023. Google has not published comparable user counts for Search or Gemini, although the engine still handles billions of queries daily; it processed about four billion searches per day as early as 2009.

Similarweb estimated 1.7 billion monthly visits to ChatGPT’s website in December 2023, a figure that excluded mobile app traffic. Since then, OpenAI has added language support, voice options, and weekly interface tweaks that have likely aided adoption.

Why It Matters

The rapid climb toward 700 million weekly users highlights how generative AI is beginning to replace conventional search for many tasks. Datos research cited by a Wall Street Journal report shows AI assistants now command 5.6 percent of U.S. desktop search queries - double their share a year earlier.

Among new large-language-model adopters surveyed by Datos, 40 percent of desktop visits already go to AI tools, while traditional engines have fallen to a 61 percent share. If ChatGPT maintains its current trajectory, its weekly user base could approach one billion before the end of 2025, applying more pressure to incumbents such as Google and Microsoft.

Looking Ahead

OpenAI has yet to reveal how many of the forthcoming 700 million weekly users pay for ChatGPT Plus. Analysts will watch for monetization updates as the company expands its enterprise lineup and prepares next-generation models.