ChatGPT now has more than 900 million weekly active users, OpenAI announced. This is the first time OpenAI has publicly cited the 900 million weekly active user mark. The company shared the figure while announcing a historic $110 billion funding round.
ChatGPT has reached 900 million weekly active users, marking a fundamental shift in how people discover information and research products online.
The growth is unprecedented, marking a 350% increase from the 200 million users reported 18 months ago. OpenAI’s revenue engine is scaling in tandem, now supported by 50 million paid consumer subscribers and 9 million paying business accounts. This dominance secures an estimated 80% share of the generative AI market, significantly outpacing competitors like Gemini and Claude in daily engagement.
The $110 billion capital injection values OpenAI at approximately $730 billion (pre-money). The round was led by Amazon ($50 billion), with SoftBank and NVIDIA each contributing $30 billion. Crucially, OpenAI has entered a multi-year strategic partnership with Amazon to utilize AWS infrastructure and custom chips for model development, ensuring the capacity to serve its nearly one billion users.
Why This Matters for Search Strategy
The scale of ChatGPT’s adoption indicates AI has become a mainstream discovery layer for daily use. AI assistants have moved beyond early adopters into mass-market territory.
This milestone represents a fundamental shift in information discovery. Brands that optimize only for traditional search engines risk becoming invisible in the growing segment of queries that never reach Google, Bing, or other conventional platforms.
For digital marketers and SEO professionals, it is clear that user behavior continues to fragment beyond traditional search. If 900 million people use ChatGPT weekly, discovery, research, and product comparisons are increasingly happening within AI interfaces. That said, many of those actions tend to lead users to traditional search for confirmation.
ChatGPT is a place where you compete for queries, commercial intent, and brand visibility. While not all behavior here is “search” in the strict sense, you need to understand how AI models are talking about your brand, as well as how that impacts conversions. Furthermore, OpenAI is formalizing monetization with brand advertisements served at an estimated $60 CPM, collapsing the wall between organic presence and paid media within the AI ecosystem.
To remain visible, brands must optimize for machine readability and semantic clarity. Visibility now depends on how content is surfaced, cited, or summarized in AI-generated answers. For a detailed guide on ensuring your site is accessible to the LLM agents driving these searches, view our AEO Technical Checklist.
Karamchan
AEO Insights Researcher