Microsoft Copilot Statistics October 2026: Users, Paid Seats, Usage & Market Share

Key takeaways

• 112.1 million monthly active users across all Copilot products in October 2026, per First Page Sage, up 1.9% on September. Microsoft does not publish a combined figure.

• Paid Microsoft 365 Copilot seats reached about 38.1 million, 8.1% of Microsoft 365 commercial seats, up from 15.6 million at the end of 2025 (First Page Sage).

• Large deployments are multiplying. On its October 28 call, Microsoft said customers with more than 50,000 Copilot seats grew more than 8x year over year, and customers consuming credits through usage-based billing grew more than 75% in the quarter.

• Usage lags licences. Only 65.8% of paid Microsoft 365 Copilot seats are active in a given week, averaging 24.1 prompts per active user.

• Consumer Copilot is small and shrinking. The Copilot app and website has 24.1 million monthly users, Windows 13.9 million and Edge and Bing 9.0 million, and all three fell in October.

• Copilot's share of AI chatbot web traffic has slipped from 2.0% to 1.5% in a year on Similarweb's measure, and it holds 1.3% of US chatbot usage on First Page Sage's.

• Referral share is volatile. Statcounter has Copilot at 3.19% in March, 2.77% in August, 1.78% in September and 2.18% in October.

• Microsoft grew 19% to $92.3 billion in the quarter, with its premium seat-based offers, including Microsoft 365 Copilot, E5 and E7, leading growth in revenue per user.

Microsoft Copilot is not one product. It is a brand covering a free chat tool for business accounts, a paid add-on for Microsoft 365, a consumer app, and assistants built into Windows, Edge, and Bing. That makes its numbers easy to misread: a headline user count mixes people who chose Copilot with people who found it inside Word. The distinction matters for brands trying to be recommended by AI assistants, because most Copilot use is work on documents and email, not open-ended research. Compared with ChatGPT, Copilot is a workplace tool first and a discovery channel a distant second.

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

How many people use Microsoft Copilot?

First Page Sage puts monthly active users across all Copilot products at 112.1 million in October 2026. The split by product shows where the users are:

Source: First Page Sage, Microsoft Copilot Usage Statistics, November 2026. Business products account for 58.1% of users and are the only ones growing. The consumer surfaces all lost users in October.

On the web, Copilot drew about 99 million visits a month. GitHub Copilot, the coding assistant, is counted separately: First Page Sage estimates 53.9 million users.

What people use Copilot for

Source: First Page Sage, November 2026. Document work and summarising make up 45.8% of prompts. Only 17.6% are open searches for information, which is why Copilot influences far fewer buying decisions than a general-purpose assistant.

How many businesses pay for Copilot?

Microsoft 365 Copilot is a paid add-on, so seats are the clearest measure of business adoption.

Source: First Page Sage, November 2026. Net new seats peaked at 3.6 million in June and have slowed since. Customers with more than 50,000 seats are driving growth, which suggests adoption is deepening inside large buyers while the broader base of smaller businesses stays mostly unconverted: more than 90% of commercial seats still have no Copilot licence.

What Microsoft said on October 28

Microsoft's fiscal first-quarter call added context on how the product is being sold:

• Customers with more than 50,000 Copilot seats grew more than 8x year over year, including Capgemini, HCLTech, Hitachi Group, Truist Financial and the UK's tax authority.

• Copilot customers consuming credits through usage-based billing grew more than 75% over the quarter.

• User satisfaction improved nearly 20% quarter over quarter to another all-time high.

• Revenue per user growth was led by premium seat-based offers, including Microsoft 365 Copilot, E5 and E7. E7 has already reached millions of paid seats.

• Paid Microsoft 365 commercial seats grew 5%, with weaker sales execution noted as an impact.

• More than 120,000 customers use Foundry, Microsoft's platform for building AI applications, with revenue more than tripling.

Source: Microsoft, fiscal year 2027 first-quarter earnings call, October 28, 2026. Total revenue was $92.3 billion, up 19%, and Microsoft Cloud grew 30%.

Usage versus licences

Buying a licence and using one are different. First Page Sage found 65.8% of paid Microsoft 365 Copilot seats are active in a given week, averaging 24.1 prompts per weekly active user. Roughly one paid seat in three goes unused in any week, a figure that matters at renewal. Only 8.1% of commercial seats have a paid licence, so the ceiling for growth is high while the pressure to prove value is real.

Who uses Copilot?

Similarweb's audience data for copilot.microsoft.com shows a more balanced split than most AI assistants: 52.46% of visitors are male and 47.54% are female, with 25–34 year olds the largest age group. That is a narrower gender gap than DeepSeek (63.31% male) or Grok (68.34% male) show on the same measure. Copilot's audience is shaped by who has a Microsoft 365 account at work, rather than by who seeks out an AI app.

How Copilot compares to the competition

Market share: AI chatbot web traffic

Similarweb measures each chatbot's share of generative AI website traffic. It covers websites only, not app usage or Copilot inside Microsoft's own apps.

Source: Similarweb, gen AI website traffic share, via Rhino Rank, November 2026. Copilot has lost a quarter of its share in a year and sits sixth of seven, behind DeepSeek and Grok.

Market share: US chatbot usage

First Page Sage ranks chatbots by share of US web and mobile monthly active users in October 2026:

Source: First Page Sage, Top Generative AI Chatbots by Market Share, November 2026. Copilot's share has crept from 1.15% in January to 1.34% in October. First Page Sage lists OpenAI and Anthropic models among those Copilot runs on, so its position depends on how many customers choose Microsoft's wrapper over the underlying products.

Market share: AI chatbot referrals

Statcounter tracks clicks that chatbots send to other websites:

Source: Statcounter Global Stats, August to October 2026. ChatGPT fell almost 29 points in a single month, so treat October as a reading to confirm against November before concluding anything. Copilot's referral share is small either way.

Reach compared

Copilot's user count is a fraction of ChatGPT's or Gemini's, but its distribution is different: it sits inside tools that businesses already use every day. For the same breakdown on the other platforms, see our Claude, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews statistics.

Sources

• First Page Sage — Microsoft Copilot Usage Statistics, November 2026 (October data)

• First Page Sage — Top Generative AI Chatbots by Market Share, November 2026

• First Page Sage — ChatGPT Usage Statistics, November 2026

• First Page Sage — Claude Usage Statistics, November 2026

• Microsoft — Fiscal Year 2027 First Quarter Earnings Conference Call, October 28, 2026

• Microsoft — Microsoft announces first quarter results, October 28, 2026

• Rhino Rank — AI statistics report, November 2026 (Similarweb and Statcounter data)

• Similarweb — Gen AI website traffic share update, September 2026

• Similarweb — copilot.microsoft.com audience, November 2026

• Statcounter Global Stats — AI Chatbot Market Share, October 2026

• Google — Gemini app hits 1 billion monthly active users, August 11, 2026