AI Assistant Usage Statistics (October 2026)

Last updated: October 20, 2026

More than 1.2 billion people now use a single AI assistant every week, according to its maker's October 7, 2026 model launch post. Back on November 5, 2025, the same company put that number at 800 million.

That's roughly 400 million extra weekly users in eleven months. And it's only one assistant.

The trouble is that every company counts differently. One reports weekly users, another monthly users, a third counts paid seats, and a few publish nothing at all. Most "AI stats" pages online blend those into one neat ranking that doesn't hold up.

So this roundup only uses numbers the companies themselves have published in the last 12 months: filings, earnings calls, official blogs and executive statements. Each figure has a date and a link. Where a company hasn't published a number, we say so instead of filling the gap with an estimate.

TL;DR

• ChatGPT reports the largest audience on the strictest metric: more than 1.2 billion weekly users as of October 7, 2026.

• The Gemini app passed 1 billion monthly users on August 11, 2026, and Google's AI Mode in Search passed 1 billion monthly users by July 22, 2026.

• Meta AI last reported more than 1 billion monthly actives on October 29, 2025, and hasn't published a newer total since.

• Microsoft's Copilot family passed 150 million monthly users in October 2025. Microsoft 365 Copilot passed 30 million paid seats in July 2026.

• Grok had about 117 million monthly users of its AI features as of March 31, 2026, per the SpaceX IPO prospectus.

• Anthropic (Claude), Perplexity and DeepSeek haven't published an official user count in the last 12 months.

• For B2B marketers, the headline user counts matter less than where your buyers use these tools: at work, inside Microsoft 365, ChatGPT business plans and Claude.

AI assistant usage at a glance

A quick word on method. We fetched every source above on October 18, 2026 and kept only figures dated October 18, 2025 or later. We left out app-tracker estimates, traffic panels and stat-roundup sites, even when they're the only number around. So when a row says "no official figure," that's the finding, not an oversight.

ChatGPT: 1.2 billion weekly users and an ad business

OpenAI reports the strictest metric of the big players, weekly users rather than monthly, and its number is still the largest published on that basis.

Here's the trail of official numbers over the last 12 months:

• November 5, 2025: more than 800 million weekly users, more than 1 million business customers paying for ChatGPT for Work or the API and more than 7 million ChatGPT for Work seats (OpenAI).

• February 27, 2026: more than 900 million weekly active users, more than 50 million consumer subscribers and more than 9 million paying business users (OpenAI).

• August 31, 2026: more than 1 billion weekly active users, mentioned in the ChatGPT Ads update (OpenAI).

• October 7, 2026: "more than 1.2 billion people who use ChatGPT each week" (OpenAI).

The business-user number is the one we'd watch if you sell software. Nine million paying business users means ChatGPT isn't just a consumer toy your buyers play with at home. It's a tool their employers pay for.

The ad numbers matter too. OpenAI says ChatGPT Ads hit a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate in under 200 days, with tens of thousands of advertisers, and opened self-serve buying across India, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa on August 31, 2026. When OpenAI describes the people it shows ads to, its first example is someone "choosing software for their business."

What's missing: OpenAI doesn't break weekly users down by country, by free versus paid, or by work versus personal use in these posts. So you can't tell from official data how many of those 1.2 billion people are B2B buyers.

Our take: if you only have the budget to measure one assistant, it's still this one. But relying on it alone gets riskier every quarter. If you want the playbook side, see how to get recommended by ChatGPT.

Gemini: the app plus Google's AI surfaces in Search

Google publishes monthly figures, and it has two separate numbers you should keep apart.

The Gemini app:

• July 22, 2026: 950 million monthly active users, with daily active users tripling in the last year (Alphabet Q2 release, CEO remarks).

• August 11, 2026: more than 1 billion monthly users, which Google calls the fastest-growing product in its history (Google).

That August post also shared how people use it. 63% of users talk to Gemini by voice. The app generates more than 150 million images a day. And it has more than 100 million active users on iOS alone.

Google's AI surfaces inside Search:

• AI Mode passed 1 billion monthly active users after its global expansion in October 2025, according to Sundar Pichai's Q2 2026 remarks on July 22, 2026.

• In the same remarks, Google said AI Overviews and AI Mode now run as one search experience, and that AI features in Search send "billions of clicks to websites every week."

On the business side, Google says nearly 90% of the Fortune 100 use Gemini Enterprise and more than 9 million developers build with its models each month (same July 22 remarks).

What's missing: Google doesn't say how much the Gemini app and AI Mode audiences overlap, and it doesn't publish weekly figures. A monthly user can be someone who opened the app once in 30 days, so these numbers aren't directly comparable with ChatGPT's weekly count.

Our take: plenty of B2B teams still treat Google's AI features as "SEO stuff" and ChatGPT as "AI search." That split doesn't make sense anymore. AI Mode alone has a monthly audience in the same range as ChatGPT's weekly one, and it lives inside the search engine your buyers already use.

Claude: no user count, but the strongest enterprise signals

Anthropic hasn't published an official monthly or weekly user count for Claude in the last 12 months. We checked its newsroom and its two funding announcements from 2026. Neither contains one.

What Anthropic has published is revenue and customer data:

• February 12, 2026: run-rate revenue of $14 billion. The number of customers spending more than $100,000 a year grew 7x in a year, more than 500 customers spend over $1 million a year, and eight of the Fortune 10 are Claude customers (Anthropic).

• Same post: Claude Code passed $2.5 billion in run-rate revenue, and its weekly active users doubled between January 1 and February 12, 2026.

• May 28, 2026: run-rate revenue "crossed $47 billion earlier this month" (Anthropic).

You'll see Claude user counts on plenty of stat pages. They come from app-download trackers and traffic panels, not from Anthropic, so they're not in this post.

What's missing: anything about consumer reach. Revenue tells you companies are paying. It doesn't tell you how many people open Claude each week.

Our take: don't read the missing user number as weakness. Claude's numbers point at work use, coding and enterprise buying. For a B2B SaaS company, that's arguably a more relevant audience than a bigger consumer base. If your buyers are engineers, product teams or technical evaluators, we'd put Claude on your tracking list next to ChatGPT.

Microsoft Copilot: seats, not reach

Microsoft reports Copilot in pieces, and the pieces don't add up to a single consumer number.

The official data points:

• October 29, 2025: Microsoft's first-party family of Copilots passed 150 million monthly active users "across information work, coding, security, science, health, and consumer." Microsoft also said it had 900 million monthly active users of AI features across its products (FY26 Q1 call).

• January 28, 2026: daily users of the consumer Copilot app increased nearly 3x year over year (FY26 Q2 call).

• July 29, 2026: more than 30 million paid Microsoft 365 Copilot seats, with net seat adds more than doubling quarter over quarter. GitHub Copilot reached 50 million users (FY26 Q4 call).

The July call had a usage detail worth knowing. Satya Nadella said conversations per Microsoft 365 Copilot user nearly doubled year over year, and that average weekly engagement is "on par with Outlook and Teams." He also said Microsoft plans to fold its consumer and commercial Copilot experiences into one "super app."

What's missing: a standalone monthly user count for the consumer Copilot app. Microsoft gives growth rates for it, not a total. The 150 million family figure mixes coding, security and consumer tools, so it isn't comparable with ChatGPT or Gemini either.

Our take: for B2B, the 30 million paid seats are the number that matters. Those seats sit inside companies, connected to Outlook, Teams, SharePoint and Excel. When a buyer asks Copilot to compare vendors at work, that's a research session you won't see in your analytics. Microsoft also says Bing and Edge have both taken share for five straight years, which keeps Bing's index relevant for anyone tracking AI visibility.

Grok: the only usage figure that comes from an IPO filing

Grok's official number comes from a document with legal teeth: the SpaceX IPO prospectus filed with the SEC (Grok and X now sit inside SpaceX, which reports them in its AI segment). The final prospectus is dated June 11, 2026.

From the prospectus:

• About 117 million monthly active users used Grok's AI features as of March 31, 2026, up from about 89 million as of December 31, 2025.

• Those sit inside about 550 million combined monthly active users across Grok and X.

• About 1.9 million SuperGrok, SuperGrok Heavy and SuperGrok Lite paid subscribers, out of 6.3 million total paid subscribers across X and Grok.

The filing also defines what counts. An active user is someone who interacted with Grok or X through a browser or app at least once in the 30 days before the measurement date. That's a monthly definition, and the 117 million includes people using Grok inside X, not just the standalone app.

SpaceX's second-quarter 2026 results, released August 4, 2026, say Grok and X subscription revenue increased but don't give an updated user count. So March 31 is the latest official figure.

Our take: the quarter-over-quarter jump from 89 million to 117 million is real growth, but Grok's reach is tied tightly to X. If your buyers spend time on X, Grok matters more for you than its total suggests. If they don't, it's a lower priority than ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot or Claude.

Perplexity: influence without a published total

Perplexity hasn't published an official total for users or queries in the last 12 months. The query figures still going around online date from before October 2025, which puts them outside this roundup's window.

What Perplexity has published is usage-pattern data, and some of it's more useful than a user count:

• December 9, 2025: a study with Harvard researchers of hundreds of millions of anonymized Comet and Comet Assistant interactions (Perplexity). It found 57% of agent activity was cognitive work. Productivity and workflow tasks made up 36%, and learning and research another 21%.

• The same study found that marketing, sales, management and entrepreneurship showed the highest "stickiness," meaning people in those fields used the assistant more intensively once they adopted it.

• February 26, 2026: across Perplexity Enterprise customers in 2025, no single AI model captured more than 23% of queries by year end (Perplexity).

The same February post said the Perplexity app comes preloaded on every Samsung Galaxy S26. That's distribution, not usage, so it's not in the table.

Our take: the 23% figure is the most underrated stat in this post. Even inside one product, business users spread their questions across models. Your brand's visibility in one model tells you very little about the others.

Meta AI: a big number that's getting old

Meta's headline figure is large, but it's also the oldest one here.

• October 29, 2025: "More than a billion monthly actives already use Meta AI," Mark Zuckerberg said on the Q3 2025 earnings call.

• January 28, 2026: CFO Susan Li said Meta AI was available in more than 200 markets, with WhatsApp driving engagement in places like India and Indonesia, and Facebook driving it in the US (Q4 2025 call).

• April 29, 2026: after Meta began running Meta AI on its new Muse Spark model, Meta reported double-digit percentage increases in sessions per user (Q1 2026 call).

• July 29, 2026: Zuckerberg said the number of people interacting with the assistant each day was up 60% since the rebuild, and that WhatsApp is the leading surface where people engage with Meta AI (Q2 2026 call).

What's missing: a fresh monthly total, and a definition. The October 29, 2025 figure will be more than 12 months old by the next refresh, so check Meta's next earnings call before relying on it. Meta AI lives inside WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and Messenger, so a "monthly active" may be someone who touched an AI feature in an app they were already using. Meta hasn't said how it counts.

Our take: Meta AI's reach is huge, but it's mostly consumer and messaging-led. For most B2B SaaS companies, it's a "watch" item, not a priority, unless you sell to small businesses that run on WhatsApp.

DeepSeek: no official figure

DeepSeek hasn't published an official user count. Its public materials focus on models and API documentation, and the API docs we checked contain no usage totals.

The DeepSeek user numbers you'll find elsewhere come from third-party app trackers and research firms. They're estimates, so they're not here.

Our take: if your market is China, DeepSeek deserves its own research using local data sources. If you sell mostly to US and European B2B buyers, there isn't official evidence yet that it should be on your priority list.

What the numbers mean for B2B marketers

User counts make good headlines and bad strategy on their own. Here's how we'd use the data above.

Stop comparing numbers that measure different things

The table above mixes four kinds of metrics:

• Weekly users (ChatGPT)

• Monthly users (Gemini, AI Mode, Meta AI, Grok, the Copilot family)

• Paid seats or subscribers (Microsoft 365 Copilot, ChatGPT business, SuperGrok)

• Revenue and customer counts (Anthropic)

A weekly user is a stronger signal than a monthly one. A paid seat is a stronger signal than either, because a company decided it was worth paying for. Any ranking that puts 1.2 billion weekly users next to 1 billion monthly users as if they're the same thing is misleading you.

Weight the work assistants more heavily

If you sell to businesses, the most important numbers here aren't the biggest ones. They're these:

• More than 30 million paid Microsoft 365 Copilot seats (July 29, 2026)

• More than 9 million paying ChatGPT business users (February 27, 2026)

• Eight of the Fortune 10 using Claude, and more than 500 customers spending $1 million or more a year (February 12, 2026)

• Nearly 90% of the Fortune 100 using Gemini Enterprise (July 22, 2026)

That's where your buyers research vendors on company time. Their questions there look like "compare these three tools for a 200-person team" or "which vendors integrate with our CRM," not trivia.

Plan for several assistants, not one

ChatGPT's lead on weekly users is real. But Gemini and AI Mode each report a monthly audience above 1 billion (Google doesn't say how much they overlap), Copilot sits inside Microsoft 365, and Anthropic's published signals point to technical and enterprise buyers. Perplexity's own enterprise data shows no single model got more than 23% of queries.

A practical minimum for most B2B SaaS teams: track your brand in ChatGPT, Google's AI Mode and AI Overviews, Gemini, Copilot and Claude. Add Perplexity if your category is research-heavy. If you're setting that up, here's how to measure AI search visibility, and a comparison of AI visibility tracking tools.

Treat paid placement as a new layer, not a replacement

ChatGPT Ads reaching a $1 billion run rate in under 200 days means paid AI placement is now a real budget line. It'll get crowded fast in software categories, since OpenAI itself leads with a software-buying example.

But ads don't change what the assistant says in its answer. OpenAI states that advertising doesn't influence ChatGPT's answers. So the organic work still decides whether you're recommended. That's the core of answer engine optimization, and it's worth getting right before you spend on ads.

Expect your analytics to undercount AI influence

Most of this usage never shows up as a referral. A buyer asks Copilot at work, reads the answer, then types your brand into Google a week later. Google says AI features in Search send billions of clicks a week, but it doesn't say how many AI-assisted searches end without one.

Two things help:

• Add a "where did you hear about us?" field with AI assistants as an option on demo and trial forms.

• Tie organic and AI-assisted sessions to pipeline instead of traffic. The guide to B2B SEO attribution covers the setup.

Watch for stale stats in your own deck

While researching this, we kept finding months-old figures shared on X as current, usually with no date or source. If your board deck or sales enablement says "800 million ChatGPT users," it's almost a year behind. Date every figure you use and check it each quarter.

What to watch out for in any AI usage stat

Before you repeat a number from any roundup, including this one, check three things:

• Is it weekly, monthly or "total users ever"? These can differ by several multiples.

• Who published it? A company's own filing or earnings call carries legal weight. An app-download tracker is an estimate.

• How old is it? In this market, a six-month-old figure can be off by hundreds of millions.

Our honest read of the October 2026 data: AI assistants aren't a side channel for B2B anymore. They're where a large share of research starts, especially at work. The teams that win won't be the ones with the biggest content library. They'll be the ones whose product facts are clear, consistent and easy for every major assistant to find and repeat.