Home Latest Insights | News ChatGPT Search Gains Traction in Europe, Surges to 41.3 Million Monthly Active Users

ChatGPT Search Gains Traction in Europe, Surges to 41.3 Million Monthly Active Users

ChatGPT Search Gains Traction in Europe, Surges to 41.3 Million Monthly Active Users

OpenAI’s ChatGPT Search, which integrates real-time web data into its responses, is rapidly expanding in Europe.

According to a report, the feature averaged 41.3 million monthly active users in the EU for the six months ending March 31, 2025, up from 11.2 million in the prior six-month period ending October 31, 2024.

Announcing the milestone, EU Digital Services Act (DSA), wrote via a post,

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“In accordance with our obligations under Article 24(2) of the DSA, OpenAI Ireland Limited publishes information on the average ‘monthly active recipients’ of ChatGPT search (i.e. our online search features) in the European Union, calculated over a six-month period.  For the six-month period ending 31 March 2025, ChatGPT search had in combination approximately 41.3 million average monthly active recipients in the European Union.”

Under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), platforms with over 45 million monthly users face stricter rules, including allowing users to opt out of recommendation systems, sharing data with researchers, and undergoing external audits. With its current growth, ChatGPT Search may soon trigger these requirements. Non-compliance could lead to fines of up to 6% of global revenue or even temporary EU suspension.

Launched in October 2024, OpenAI rolled out the search feature on ChatGPT, to enable users to get fast, timely answers with links to relevant web sources. The search model is a fine-tuned version of GPT?4o, post-trained using novel synthetic data generation techniques, including distilling outputs from OpenAI o1 preview. ChatGPT search leverages third-party search providers, as well as content provided directly by its partners, to provide the information users are looking for.

The company also partnered with news and data providers to add up-to-date information and new visual designs for categories like weather, stocks, sports, news, and maps.

ChatGPT Search’s rapid growth to 41.3 million monthly active users in Europe by March 2025 is reshaping the search industry in several ways:

1. Increased Competition:

With its conversational AI-driven approach, ChatGPT Search challenges Google’s dominance by offering concise, synthesized answers rather than traditional link-based results. This could pressure Google, which still holds over 90% of the global search market, to innovate further, particularly in AI integration.

2. Shifting User Expectations:

The surge in adoption highlights a growing preference for natural language processing and direct answers, pushing traditional search engines to enhance their interfaces. Bing and others may accelerate AI investments to compete.

3. Market Share Redistribution:

While Google’s market share remains dominant, ChatGPT Search’s growth capturing a fraction of the 8.5 billion daily global searches could erode smaller players’ shares (e.g., Bing, Yahoo) more quickly, as users gravitate toward AI-driven alternatives.

A September 2024 poll showed that 8% of users prefer ChatGPT Search over Google. However, studies highlight reliability issues, with one noting a 67% error rate in identifying articles and another flagging inaccuracy in news content, including from OpenAI’s licensed partners.

Despite its rise, ChatGPT Search trails Google, the dominant search engine, which processes an estimated 373 times more searches. Meanwhile, ChatGPT search rise, is a wake-up call for Google, pushing it to innovate faster, protect its ad-driven model, and leverage its scale and reliability to fend off this emerging threat. Failure to adapt could lead to gradual market share erosion, though Google’s entrenched position provides a strong buffer for now.

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