Google owns over 90% of the global search engine market share—but that’s only if you don’t count AI tools. According to a report from Big Technology, ChatGPT estimates that it has about 20% of the search volume that Google does, which, by most metrics, would make it the second-largest search engine in the world—though how exactly it quantifies its metrics might give you pause.

In an interview with Big Technology, ChatGPT consumer product lead Adam Fry revealed that OpenAI’s flagship product is rapidly becoming Google-esque in size—which is the kind of thing that you’d want to say publicly ahead of a planned initial public offering.

Fry’s way of quantifying this is with “search-like queries,” which are kind of an eye-of-the-beholder thing. Fry described it as “basically anything that a user would have traditionally gone to a traditional search engine for, but is now deciding to go to ChatGPT for.” Pressed for a little more specifics, he explained, “Every time you ask a question and go search the web, that’s a search.”

Reasonably enough, though, does that mean any time ChatGPT accesses the web to find information, that is a search? Because that is happening basically all the time. Maybe it doesn’t happen for image or video generation, but most other prompts are going to lead to ChatGPT scouring external sources, if only for authority. As Fry points out, there was a period of time where ChatGPT was not able to access up-to-date information and only relied on its training data up to a certain date.

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