OpenAI’s live web-search feature built into ChatGPT is growing fast in Europe, and many are turning to it as their default way to search the web.
A recent filing from OpenAI’s European division shows that ChatGPT Search averaged around 41.3 million active users per month over the past six months. That’s a massive leap from the 11.2 million monthly users it had in the previous half-year.
This growth isn’t just impressive — it also brings the feature closer to triggering new responsibilities under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA). Once a platform hits 45 million monthly active users in Europe, it’s classified as “very large,” which comes with a bunch of extra requirements.
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These include letting users opt out of personalized recommendations, sharing data with regulators and researchers, and undergoing independent audits. If ChatGPT Search keeps climbing, it’ll likely hit that threshold soon, and if OpenAI doesn’t play by the rules, it could face fines of up to 6% of its global revenue or even a temporary ban in the EU.
Despite being relatively new, ChatGPT Search is starting to challenge big players like Google. A survey from last September found that 8% of people would rather use ChatGPT than Google as their main search engine. That’s a small slice, but not insignificant. Still, Google is way ahead — it reportedly processes 373 times more searches than ChatGPT does.
That said, AI search tools like ChatGPT have their weak spots. Studies show they can be hit-or-miss when it comes to accuracy, especially with news content. One found that ChatGPT got things wrong in 67% of article lookups, even when the articles came from publishers OpenAI has licensing deals.
So while ChatGPT Search is clearly on the rise, it’s still got some work to do — not just to grow its user base, but to meet stricter rules and improve its reliability.
