ChatGPT Search is becoming a more visible part of Europe’s search market. OpenAI’s own data shows the service recorded approximately 41.3 million monthly users in the European Union over the six-month period ending in March 2025.
That number matters because it points to a fast-growing habit: asking a generative AI system for answers instead of starting with a traditional search results page. It also raises a harder question for publishers, websites, and users: who controls discovery when answers are increasingly generated before a reader clicks anywhere else?
A sharp rise in EU usage
The latest figure comes from a mandatory filing under the EU's Digital Services Act (DSA), which requires large online platforms to disclose user metrics and content moderation efforts. In that filing, ChatGPT Search reached approximately 41.3 million monthly users in the European Union for the six-month period ending in March 2025.
The increase is striking when compared with the earlier figure of 11.2 million monthly users reported as of October 31, 2024. That earlier number was based on a screenshot of the site archived in January.
Taken together, the two figures show a nearly fourfold increase. For an AI-powered search product, that is a meaningful signal of demand, even if it does not yet put ChatGPT Search near the scale of the largest search platforms.
The growth also reflects broader interest in generative AI-based search tools. These tools do not simply return a list of links. They can summarize, organize, and frame information inside the answer itself, changing the user’s path from question to result.
What the DSA filing tells us
The Digital Services Act context is important because the numbers were not presented as a casual marketing claim. They were disclosed through a mandatory filing tied to platform reporting obligations in the European Union.
According to the source, the DSA requires large online platforms to report user metrics and content moderation efforts. That makes the filing a useful window into how many people in the EU are using ChatGPT Search on a monthly basis.
The figure does not, by itself, explain how people use the service, what they search for, or how often they return. It also does not say how much traffic ChatGPT Search sends to external websites. What it does show is the size of the audience OpenAI is reporting for the service in the EU.
For anyone watching the future of search, that distinction matters. User count is one measure of adoption. Query volume, referral traffic, and the influence of generated answers are separate questions.
AI search is growing, but Google remains far larger
ChatGPT Search is not alone in the AI search category. Perplexity, another AI-powered search engine, reported around 15 million monthly active users globally in 2024. The company also said it handled roughly 400 million search queries per month as of October that year.
Those figures show that AI search has moved beyond a niche experiment. Multiple products are attracting large audiences, and users are testing new ways to find information online.
Still, the gap with Google remains enormous. Estimates place Google's search volume at approximately 8.5 billion queries per day. Google also continues to integrate AI into its search infrastructure as part of its broader development strategy.
That means the competitive picture is not simply AI search versus traditional search. The largest incumbent is also adding AI to search, while newer services are trying to make AI-native answer systems part of everyday web use.
The open web faces a visibility problem
The source points to early studies suggesting that generative AI search platforms may reduce the role of the open web. The concern is not only whether users like AI answers. It is whether those answers send meaningful traffic back to the websites that supplied or contextualized the information.
Traffic generated by chatbots and AI-driven answers appears to be significantly lower than traffic from traditional search engines like Google. That creates a potential problem for independent websites that depend on visibility and referral traffic.
If users receive enough information inside an AI summary, they may have less reason to click through to original sources. For publishers and site owners, that could make discovery harder even when their information remains part of the broader information ecosystem.
The issue is especially important because search has long functioned as a bridge between users and the open web. If that bridge becomes a generated answer controlled by a platform, the economics and visibility of independent publishing may change.
More answers could mean more centralized control
The rise of AI search also points to a concentration of informational power among a small number of technology companies. When users rely on AI-generated summaries, the platform has more influence over which information appears, which sources are emphasized, and how the result is framed.
That does not mean every AI answer replaces the web. But it does mean the interface is changing. Instead of scanning multiple links and deciding where to go, users may increasingly begin with a synthesized response.
For users, that can feel efficient. For the open web, it can create a new dependency on platforms that decide what is surfaced. For companies building AI search, it raises questions about transparency, source visibility, and the balance between answers and referrals.
ChatGPT Search’s approximately 41.3 million monthly users in the EU show that this shift is already large enough to matter. The next question is not only how many people use AI search, but how that use reshapes the flow of attention across the web.