ChatGPT search reaches 185.6 million average monthly users in the EU

OpenAI's search feature keeps growing as it heads toward Digital Services Act obligations as a very large online search engine ChatGPT search averaged 185.6 million monthly active recipients in the European Union over the six months ending September 30, 2026. That is up from 159.1 million in the prior six-month period. The number matters for more than bragging rights. In Brussels, user counts like this decide how much regulatory homework a platform has to do. The numbers behind the jump The latest figure covers the window from April through September 2026. The previous disclosure, 159.1 million, covered the six months ending March 31, 2026. That works out to an increase of 26.5 million average monthly recipients in a single reporting period. For context, that gain alone is a little more than half of the EU’s regulatory threshold for the most heavily supervised platforms. The figures apply specifically to ChatGPT’s web search capabilities. They do not cover the broader chatbot product. So this measures people using ChatGPT to look things up on the web, not everyone asking it to draft emails or explain tax forms. The longer trend is even steeper. Earlier disclosures put ChatGPT searc...