ChatGPT Stats September 2026: Users, Subscribers, Traffic & Competition

Key takeaways

1 billion+ weekly active users — a milestone OpenAI confirmed on July 31, 2026, up from 900 million in February 2026 and 400 million in February 2025. No newer official figure has been disclosed since.
OpenAI's annualised revenue sits at $40 billion as of its August 13, 2026 disclosure, up sharply from the $25 billion it had been stuck at from February through May — with enterprise revenue overtaking consumer for the first time in July.
Anthropic's revenue has overtaken OpenAI's. Claude's annualised revenue run rate hit $65 billion by the end of July 2026 — up from $47 billion in May and $14 billion in February — even though Claude's share of chatbot referral traffic is a fraction of ChatGPT's. Enterprise API usage, not consumer chat, is driving the gap.
Skews young. 53% of users are aged 18–34. Usage drops steeply above 55 — unchanged since the prior update.
The US-India gap has narrowed sharply. By one September 2026 estimate, the US holds 17.1% of ChatGPT's visitor share against India's 16.5% — nearly tied, versus a roughly 2-to-1 US lead reported earlier in the year. India remains OpenAI's second-largest market at 100 million weekly active users.
Google Gemini crossed 1 billion monthly active users on August 11, 2026 — up from 950 million in Alphabet's July earnings call and 750 million earlier in the year — putting it roughly on par with ChatGPT itself. Separately, Google AI Overviews still reaches roughly 2 billion users via Search.
ChatGPT's share of AI chatbot referrals climbed to 79.4% in August 2026, up from 77.92% in July — its highest reading in over a year. Perplexity and Claude both lost referral share to Gemini, which keeps climbing.

ChatGPT launched in November 2022 and became the fastest consumer app to reach 100 million users. Nearly four years later, it just cleared its next symbolic milestone — 1 billion active users — but the competitive picture keeps shifting underneath it. Google, Anthropic, and Perplexity have all grown fast enough to chip away at OpenAI's near-monopoly, and Anthropic's revenue run rate has now overtaken OpenAI's outright even with a much smaller consumer footprint. For brands, this makes ranking in ChatGPT and tracking ChatGPT visibility increasingly important.

Here is a full breakdown of the numbers as of September 2026.

How many people use ChatGPT?

OpenAI confirmed more than 1 billion weekly active users on July 31, 2026 — up from 900 million in February 2026 and 400 million in February 2025. The company had originally targeted this milestone for the end of 2025, arriving about seven months behind schedule as competition from Gemini and Claude intensified.

Estimating monthly active users requires an adjustment because weekly figures count the same person multiple times across weeks. Third-party trackers now put the figure at roughly 1.1 billion monthly active users — though OpenAI does not publish this number officially.

In total web traffic, ChatGPT (excluding Microsoft Copilot, which is powered by ChatGPT but tracked separately) is estimated at around 6.1 billion visits per month as of September 2026 — 6.4 billion including Copilot — up from 5.51 billion in April 2026. First Page Sage's weighted-average model, which blends 16 sources, puts total ChatGPT-family users (ChatGPT plus Copilot) at 904 million as of September, with ChatGPT alone accounting for 853 million and growing roughly 4% quarter over quarter.

In the United States, ChatGPT has an estimated 77.2 million monthly active users, up from 67.7 million earlier in 2026.

ChatGPT processes over 2.5 billion queries per day across all users and surfaces.

Guest users vs. registered accounts

OpenAI allows unauthenticated access to ChatGPT — anyone can use it without creating an account, though with more limited functionality and tighter rate limits.

OpenAI has not disclosed a precise breakdown of guest versus logged-in usage, and third-party analytics platforms do not distinguish the two cleanly. What the data does show:

ChatGPT has well over 500 million registered accounts, based on disclosed user milestones through 2025.
Monthly web visits (~6.1 billion) vastly exceed registered account counts, which suggests a large volume of repeat sessions from logged-in users, bot traffic, and a meaningful share of unauthenticated guest use.
Free-tier users represent roughly 81% of ChatGPT's active user base — the vast majority of active users remain on the free tier whether or not they have a registered account.

How many people pay for ChatGPT?

OpenAI's most recent confirmed figure is 50 million paying subscribers across all tiers, first disclosed in April 2026 and still the widely cited number as of September, with no newer official disclosure. That figure spans four consumer and business plans:

ChatGPT Free — no cost, rate-limited access
ChatGPT Plus — $20/month, the original consumer tier
ChatGPT Pro — $200/month, premium access; less than 1% of subscribers but growing
ChatGPT Team / Enterprise — per-seat pricing for businesses, with over 5 million users across these tiers

Free-tier users represent roughly 81% of ChatGPT's active user base. Paid users, while a minority, engage with the product 4.2× more per week than free users.

OpenAI is targeting 122 million total paying subscribers by end of 2026, driven in part by a new $8/month plan aimed at price-sensitive markets in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. If reached, that would be more than double the current base — though analysts note it requires replacing high-value Plus subscribers with a much larger volume of cheaper ones.

Revenue

OpenAI's annualised revenue jumped to $40 billion in August 2026 — a sharp acceleration after holding near $25 billion (roughly $2 billion per month) from February through May. Bloomberg reported the run-rate topped $40 billion ahead of a planned IPO, with July revenue growing more than 20% month-over-month on coding, subscriptions, and the ad business. Notably, enterprise revenue overtook consumer revenue for the first time in July 2026, with business customer count growing 32% that month.

At roughly $3.3 billion per month against 50 million paying consumer subscribers, the blended figure works out to well over $60 per paying user — but that math is increasingly misleading now that enterprise accounts for more than half of total revenue.

Who uses ChatGPT? Age demographics

ChatGPT skews heavily toward younger adults. The 18–34 age bracket accounts for 53% of all users, and usage drops significantly above 55.

Age group	Share of users
18–24	23.32%
25–34	29.67%
35–44	19.06%
45–54	13.85%
55–64	8.88%
65+	5.23%

Source: DemandSage. This breakdown was unchanged again in DemandSage's September 2026 update.

Where are ChatGPT users?

The United States is the largest market by both total users and web traffic share, but India is closing the gap fast — reaching 100 million weekly active users after the launch of ChatGPT Go in early 2026.

Top countries by total users

Country	Total users
United States	205 million
India	198 million
Brazil	69.6 million
Canada	64.8 million
France	51.6 million

Top countries by web traffic share

Country	Share of ChatGPT visitors
United States	17.1%
India	16.5%
Brazil	5.8%
Canada	5.4%
France	4.3%

Source: First Page Sage, September 2026 (16-source weighted average). This methodology shows a much narrower US-India gap than single-source trackers like Similarweb, which had the US at 18.53% and India at 9.79% earlier in the year — a reminder that country-share figures vary significantly by measurement approach.

On a per-capita adoption basis, the picture shifts. Kenya ranks first globally, ahead of the US, UK, and UAE — driven by mobile-first access and the lower-cost Go plan. Canada leads in engagement despite ranking fourth by total users, with Canadians averaging ~130 ChatGPT messages per citizen per year.

How ChatGPT compares to the competition

ChatGPT remains the dominant AI assistant by almost every measure, but its share of the market has declined meaningfully as rivals have scaled.

Google AI Overviews

Google AI Overviews — the AI-generated summaries embedded directly in Google Search results — reached 2 billion monthly users by early 2026, deployed across more than 200 countries and territories.

The key distinction: AI Overviews users are not choosing an AI product. They are using Google Search, and the AI layer is built in. That said, 2 billion monthly users experiencing AI-generated answers is a structural shift that puts AI Overviews in a different category from any standalone chatbot.

The standalone Gemini app (Google's direct ChatGPT competitor) crossed 1 billion monthly active users on August 11, 2026 — up from 950 million reported on Alphabet's Q2 2026 earnings call in July, and 750 million earlier in the year — making it, per Google, the company's fastest-growing product ever. More than 100 million of those users are on Apple devices. That puts Gemini roughly on par with ChatGPT's own MAU, a separate figure from AI Overviews.

Perplexity

Perplexity has approximately 45 million monthly active users, more than doubling from 22 million at the start of 2025 — unchanged from the figure widely cited earlier in 2026, though some sources put the company's broader reach (across all products, not just core search) above 100 million. Revenue has kept climbing fast: annualised recurring revenue reached roughly $750 million by August 2026, per Sacra estimates, up from $450 million in March and $232 million at the end of 2025. The company remains valued at roughly $20 billion.

Perplexity positions itself as an AI-first search engine rather than a general chatbot — its users are typically doing research and citation-heavy work, making it a direct challenger to Google for informational queries.

Claude (Anthropic)

Claude's user base jumped sharply in Sensor Tower's State of AI 2026 report, which puts Claude at roughly 245 million monthly active users across all surfaces as of mid-2026 — up from the ~72 million (16 million web, 56 million mobile) reported in DemandSage's prior update. Anthropic does not publish a consolidated MAU figure, and the jump partly reflects a broader measurement scope (all surfaces, not just web and the standalone app) rather than a like-for-like month-over-month gain, so treat the two figures as not directly comparable.

Claude's referral market share more than doubled in a single month in early 2026 — widely attributed to the "QuitGPT" movement — jumping from 0.92% in January to 2.91% in March and peaking at 3.19% in July. It has since pulled back to 2.57% in August 2026 per Statcounter, even as Claude's revenue keeps accelerating — a sign the growth is now coming from enterprise API usage rather than consumer chat share. The company still serves 300,000+ business customers and over 87,000 developer organisations via the API.

Anthropic's revenue has exploded: annualised run rate hit $14 billion in February 2026, $47 billion in May, and $65 billion by the end of July 2026 — a figure that now exceeds OpenAI's own $40 billion run rate, despite Claude's much smaller consumer footprint. Anthropic was valued at $965 billion after a $65 billion Series H round in May 2026, a figure that has not been revised since despite the subsequent revenue growth.

Market share: standalone chatbots only

Statcounter measures AI chatbot referrals to third-party websites — a proxy for active usage that excludes Google AI Overviews (which is embedded in Search and generates no outbound referral traffic).

Platform	Share (August 2026)	Change (vs. July 2026)
ChatGPT	79.4%	+1.5pp
Google Gemini	10.9%	+1.0pp
Perplexity	4.31%	-1.6pp
Microsoft Copilot	2.79%	-0.3pp
Claude	2.57%	-0.6pp

Source: Statcounter Global Stats, August 2026 (compared against the July 2026 figures reported previously).

ChatGPT's referral share climbed to its highest point in over a year in August, reversing the narrative of a "stabilised" mid-70s share that had held for several months. The composition shift is also new: Gemini keeps climbing at everyone else's expense, but this time Claude lost referral share too, even as its revenue and (per Sensor Tower) its broader active-user count both surged — a sign Claude's growth is increasingly enterprise-API-driven rather than coming from casual chatbot use that shows up in referral traffic.

Market share: including Google AI Overviews

The standalone chatbot view excludes the largest AI surface on the internet. When you include Google AI Overviews — which serves AI-generated answers to 2 billion monthly users inside Google Search — the competitive landscape looks very different.

Platform	Monthly users (est.)	Type
Google AI Overviews	2 billion	Embedded in Google Search
ChatGPT	~1.1 billion	Standalone chatbot
Google Gemini (app)	1 billion+	Standalone chatbot
Claude	~245 million	Standalone chatbot
Perplexity	45 million	AI search engine

The gap between ChatGPT and Gemini on raw MAU has essentially closed since May 2026, when Gemini's app sat at 750 million against ChatGPT's roughly 1 billion. Claude's position in this table has also shifted materially: on Sensor Tower's broader all-surfaces measure it now sits well above Perplexity, a reordering from earlier in the year when the two were closer in scale — though as noted above, Claude's referral-traffic share (the narrower, more directly comparable metric in the table above) still trails Perplexity's.

The caveat: these figures are not apples-to-apples. An AI Overviews "user" is someone who ran a Google search that happened to return an AI summary — they may not have consciously engaged with it. A ChatGPT user opened an app and typed a message. The intent and depth of engagement differ significantly.

Still, the reach numbers make clear that Google is the dominant force in AI-assisted answers globally — even if ChatGPT wins on deliberate AI product usage.