How People Use ChatGPT

Research reveals how people actually use ChatGPT — primarily for practical guidance, information seeking, and writing — and how AI summaries in search results are fundamentally changing browsing behavior.

How People use ChatGPT
NBER ↗

The three most common Conversation Topics are Practical Guidance, Seeking Information, and Writing — collectively accounting for about 77% of all ChatGPT conversations.

About 49% of messages are users asking ChatGPT for guidance, advice, or information (Asking)
40% are requests to complete tasks that can be plugged into a process (Doing)
1% are messages that have no clear intent (Expressing)

Nearly half of all messages sent by adults were from users under the age of 26.

Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results
Pew Research ↗

Google users who encounter an AI summary are less likely to click on links to other websites than users who do not see one. Users who encountered an AI summary clicked on a traditional search result link in 8% of all visits. Those who did not encounter an AI summary clicked on a search result nearly twice as often (15% of visits).

Google users are more likely to end their browsing session entirely after visiting a search page with an AI summary than on pages without a summary. This happened on 26% of pages with an AI summary, compared with 16% of pages with only traditional search results.

Half of online shoppers now use Gen AI: The hype, the habits, and the hesitations
Omnisend ↗

Surveyed 4,000 adults across the US, UK, Canada, and Australia to find out how shoppers are actually using AI.

Around 50% of online shoppers in each country use Gen AI for ecommerce tasks at least once a month
ChatGPT dominates and is preferred by 46% of respondents who use AI for shopping
1 in 4 say ChatGPT gives better product suggestions than Google
85%+ report at least one concern: privacy, AI fatigue, or bad recommendations
1 in 3 shoppers still do not want AI handling checkout

In short, AI has earned a seat at the shopping table, but not full control of the wallet just yet.