What do people actually use ChatGPT for? A new study finally tells us.
The numbers confirm what people already sense: ChatGPT is sliding into the space Google once owned, with the difference that people expect a finished answer, not a list of options. This comes from a brand-new OpenAI study, the first time we’ve been able to see usage data at this level of detail since GPT launched.
Three Main Takeaways
- Writing dominates — not just creative fiction, but editing, summarizing, translation, and personal communication.
- Guidance is a close second — tutoring, advice, health, and ideation make up a huge share, showing people treat ChatGPT like a cross between a tutor and a coach.
- Fact-finding isn’t fringe — a big slice of usage is simply asking for specific info, proving ChatGPT has become part of everyday search habits, not a futuristic outlier.
About the Source
- The graphic is based on an OpenAI economic research study (2025).
- The main dataset comes from 1.1 million sampled conversations across logged-in consumer users.
- A second dataset of 1.58 million messages (from ~130k users) was also analyzed to check for consistency.
- Privacy safeguards shaped the sampling: one message per conversation for the large dataset, capped message counts per user in the smaller one.
Related Facts
📈 By mid-2025, consumer users were sending about 2.6 billion ChatGPT messages per day, putting it on par with major social platforms in raw interaction volume.
🧑💻 Use skewed younger and more educated, but adoption was broad enough that the authors treated it as a general consumer tool, not just a tech-niche phenomenon.
🔍 Roughly half of the “seeking info” use cases were direct replacements for Google-style queries, but with a preference for synthesis instead of lists of links.
🏫 Education stood out: teachers and students both leaned heavily on ChatGPT, raising questions about pedagogy and plagiarism but also about access to tutoring at scale.
🌍 Non-English usage was significant and rising quickly, suggesting that translation and localized tutoring are accelerating global adoption beyond U.S. and Europe.
