Perplexity vs ChatGPT statistics at a glance
| Category | Statistic | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Users | ChatGPT has more than 900 million weekly active users and more than 50 million consumer subscribers (company claim, February 2026) | OpenAI, 2026 |
| Market share | ChatGPT held 79.4% of worldwide AI chatbot page views in August 2026; Perplexity held 4.31% | Statcounter, 2026 |
| Market share | ChatGPT got about 18 chatbot page views for every Perplexity page view in August 2026, and about 19 in the US | Statcounter, 2026 (computed) |
| Volume | ChatGPT users sent more than 2.5 billion prompts a day in July 2025 (company claim) | Axios, 2025 |
| Volume | Perplexity answers 1.5 billion questions a month worldwide, up from 780 million in May 2025 | CNBC, 2026 |
| Volume | ChatGPT handled about 83 prompts of all kinds for every Perplexity query in mid-2025, a scale gap rather than a search-share ratio | Axios and TechCrunch, 2025 (computed) |
| Revenue | OpenAI generates $2 billion in revenue per month and closed a round at an $852 billion valuation (March 2026) | OpenAI, 2026 |
| Revenue | Perplexity raised $200 million at a $20 billion valuation in September 2025, The Information reported; Perplexity hasn't published its revenue | TechCrunch, 2025 |
| Citations | Wikipedia is ChatGPT's top cited source at 7.8% of citations; Reddit is Perplexity's at 6.6%, across 680 million citations | Profound, 2025 |
| Citations | 28.6% of Perplexity's cited URLs rank in Google's top 10 for the prompt; for ChatGPT it's 8.0% | Ahrefs, 2025 |
| Accuracy | Perplexity misidentified the source of 37% of news excerpts; ChatGPT Search got 134 of 200 wrong | Tow Center, 2025 |
| Referrals | OpenAI crawled 887 pages per referral sent back; Perplexity crawled 118 (early August 2025) | Cloudflare, 2025 |
| Referrals | ChatGPT sent 50% of AI referral traffic and Perplexity 30.7% across 35,000 sites | Ahrefs, 2025 |
| Disputes | CNN sued Perplexity in the Southern District of New York on 28 May 2026, after Dow Jones (October 2024), Britannica (September 2025), the Chicago Tribune and The New York Times (December 2025) filed there | CourtListener, 2026 |
How many people use Perplexity compared with ChatGPT?
On users, the Perplexity vs ChatGPT gap is the widest on this page. ChatGPT has more than 900 million weekly active users by OpenAI's own count, while Perplexity holds 4.31% of worldwide AI chatbot page views against ChatGPT's 79.4%, according to Statcounter's August 2026 data. That's about 18 ChatGPT page views for every Perplexity one. Perplexity does not publish a global user number, which tells you something on its own.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| ChatGPT passed 900 million weekly active users and 50 million consumer subscribers, OpenAI said on 27 February 2026. That's up from 800 million weekly users announced in October 2025. | OpenAI, February 2026; TechCrunch, February 2026 |
| ChatGPT had 700 million weekly active users in July 2025, which the NBER working paper by OpenAI's economists puts at around 10% of the world's adult population. | NBER Working Paper 34255, September 2025 |
| OpenAI claims ChatGPT has 6x the monthly web visits and mobile sessions of the next largest AI app, and 4x its total time spent (March 2026). | OpenAI, March 2026 |
| Worldwide AI chatbot page views in August 2026: ChatGPT 79.4%, Google Gemini 10.9%, Perplexity 4.31%, Microsoft Copilot 2.79%, Claude 2.57%. | Statcounter, August 2026 |
| In the United States in August 2026, ChatGPT held 72.12% of chatbot page views, Gemini 11.68%, Copilot 7.95%, Claude 4.44% and Perplexity 3.74%, putting Perplexity fifth. | Statcounter, August 2026 |
| ChatGPT's share of worldwide generative AI web traffic fell from about 76% to about 53% between June 2025 and May 2026, while its absolute visits stayed roughly flat. | Similarweb, 2026 |
| 34% of US adults had used ChatGPT by February to March 2025, double the 2023 share; 58% of adults under 30 had. | Pew Research Center, June 2025 |
| Perplexity's monthly active users in India peaked at 22 million in October 2025 during a free Airtel offer and fell to nearly 14 million by July 2026, per Sensor Tower. | TechCrunch, August 2026 |
| Perplexity says 92% of Fortune 500 companies count as users (company claim, May 2026). | CNBC, May 2026 |
Perplexity's India numbers are the most honest user data it has, and they come from Sensor Tower, not from Perplexity. A free year of Pro lifted monthly users in India from 2.6 million to 22 million, and by July 2026 the count sat 37% below that peak. When a company quotes query volume, enterprise logos and revenue growth but never a global user count, I assume the user count isn't flattering.
Statcounter measures web page views on the sites it tracks, so 4.31% says nothing about app usage, where Perplexity's device partnerships sit. The next question is how much each user asks.
How many queries does Perplexity handle compared with ChatGPT?
Perplexity answers about 1.5 billion questions a month, according to CNBC's May 2026 profile of the company, while ChatGPT users sent more than 2.5 billion prompts every day in July 2025, according to OpenAI. Both are company claims.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| ChatGPT users send more than 2.5 billion prompts a day globally, including more than 330 million in the US, OpenAI told Axios in July 2025. | Axios, July 2025 |
| Perplexity received 780 million queries in May 2025 and was handling 30 million a day, growing more than 20% month over month, Srinivas said at Bloomberg's Tech Summit. | TechCrunch, June 2025 |
| Perplexity's search engine answers 1.5 billion questions worldwide every month, CNBC reported in May 2026. | CNBC Disruptor 50, May 2026 |
| ChatGPT search usage has nearly tripled in a year, OpenAI said in March 2026. | OpenAI, March 2026 |
| 6.8% of US ChatGPT prompts included citations in May 2026, up from 1.6% in June 2025, in Similarweb's panel. Travel prompts cited sources 23% of the time; professional services under 4%. | Similarweb, 2026 |
Going from 780 million to 1.5 billion monthly questions in a year is 92% growth, and that's fast for anyone. It's also still about 2% of the monthly prompt volume ChatGPT claimed a year earlier. The gap only narrows once you remember that most ChatGPT prompts aren't searches at all.
The volume comparison flatters ChatGPT more than it should. Every Perplexity query is a search with sources; only a small, growing slice of ChatGPT prompts are, which is exactly the angle our ChatGPT vs Google search statistics page works through. Money is where the Perplexity vs ChatGPT comparison looks closest, at least on growth rates.
How do Perplexity and ChatGPT compare on revenue and valuation?
OpenAI generates $2 billion in revenue a month and was valued at $852 billion in March 2026, while Perplexity was valued at $20 billion in September 2025, according to The Information. OpenAI's numbers come from its own announcement; Perplexity's come from press reports, and its revenue has only surfaced through unnamed sources and executives' comments.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| OpenAI closed $122 billion in committed capital at an $852 billion post-money valuation on 31 March 2026, and says it now generates $2 billion in revenue per month. | OpenAI, March 2026 |
| OpenAI's ads pilot passed $100 million in annualised revenue in under six weeks, and enterprise makes up more than 40% of revenue (company claims, March 2026). | OpenAI, March 2026 |
| The Information reported in September 2025 that Perplexity raised $200 million at a $20 billion valuation. A source told TechCrunch its annual recurring revenue (ARR) was approaching $200 million, and PitchBook put total funding at $1.5 billion. Perplexity confirmed neither the valuation nor the ARR. | TechCrunch, September 2025 |
| Srinivas told CNBC in June 2026 that Perplexity had tripled its annualised revenue since the start of the year, crediting Anthropic's model advances; CNBC still described it as last reportedly valued at $20 billion. | CNBC, June 2026 |
OpenAI prints its revenue in a funding post; Perplexity's reaches the public through unnamed sources and a CEO's "tripled" with no base figure. I won't divide a confirmed valuation by an anonymous revenue number, and I'd be wary of anyone who does. Until Perplexity publishes, read its $20 billion as a bet on becoming the search layer, not a price on the business it runs today.
Revenue explains the stakes, but citations decide which websites benefit. That's where the two engines differ most.
Which sources do Perplexity and ChatGPT cite?
ChatGPT leans on Wikipedia and Perplexity leans on Reddit and YouTube: in Profound's study of 680 million citations, Wikipedia was ChatGPT's top source at 7.8% and Reddit was Perplexity's at 6.6%. Ahrefs, Semrush and Profound each used different prompts, so compare engines within one study only.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| Across 680 million citations (August 2024 to June 2025), ChatGPT's top sources were Wikipedia 7.8%, Reddit 1.8%, Forbes 1.1% and G2 1.1%. Perplexity's were Reddit 6.6%, YouTube 2.0%, Gartner 1.0% and Yelp 0.8%. | Profound, June 2025 |
| Wikipedia made up 47.9% of citations to ChatGPT's top 10 sources; Reddit made up 46.7% of Perplexity's top 10. | Profound, 2025 |
| In 957,000 ChatGPT prompts and 953,500 Perplexity prompts from June 2025, Wikipedia was ChatGPT's most mentioned domain at 16.3%. YouTube led Perplexity at 16.1%, with Wikipedia at 12.5%. | Ahrefs, June 2025 |
| Only 7 of the top 50 most mentioned websites appeared in ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews alike; 86% were not shared. | Ahrefs, June 2025 |
| Across 15,000 long-tail queries collected in early July 2025, 28.6% of Perplexity's cited URLs ranked in Google's top 10 for the prompt. ChatGPT's in-text citations ranked there 8.0% of the time (8.1% in Bing's top 10), and its bottom-of-answer references 6.1%. | Ahrefs, August 2025 |
| Across 5,000 keywords, Perplexity showed over 91% domain overlap with Google's top 10, the strongest of the engines tested; ChatGPT showed the weakest overlap with Google and correlated more with Bing. | Semrush, July 2025 |
If you rank on Google, you have a real shot at Perplexity; ChatGPT is a different game. Ahrefs found Perplexity 3.6 times more likely than ChatGPT to cite a page from Google's top 10, and Semrush landed in the same place with a different method. For ChatGPT, the work is getting onto Wikipedia, the big publishers and the review sites it trusts, which is the core of any generative engine optimization plan.
Citation behaviour is where Perplexity vs ChatGPT statistics matter most for marketers. Citing a source is one thing. Citing it correctly is another, and the only head-to-head test we have is not kind to either engine.
How accurate are Perplexity and ChatGPT citations?
Perplexity got 37% of its source identifications wrong in the Tow Center for Digital Journalism's March 2025 test, and ChatGPT Search misidentified 134 of 200 articles while signalling uncertainty only 15 times. Both engines were tested on the same 200 news excerpts.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| Eight AI search tools answered more than 60% of 1,600 source-identification queries incorrectly. Perplexity's free version got 37% wrong, the best of the eight; Grok 3 got 94% wrong. | Tow Center, March 2025 |
| ChatGPT Search incorrectly identified 134 of 200 articles and signalled a lack of confidence in only 15 of its 200 responses. | Tow Center, March 2025 |
| Perplexity's free version correctly identified all 10 National Geographic excerpts even though National Geographic blocks Perplexity's crawler. | Tow Center, March 2025 |
The Tow Center result cuts both ways for Perplexity. It was the most accurate engine tested, and part of the reason seems to be that it read pages publishers had told it not to read. ChatGPT's problem is confidence: wrong two thirds of the time and almost never saying so. I'd rather cite a source that hedges.
Accuracy matters to readers. For site owners the question that pays the bills is traffic, and here the smaller engine does something the bigger one doesn't.
Which sends more referral traffic to websites, Perplexity or ChatGPT?
ChatGPT sends more referral traffic in absolute terms, 50% of all AI referrals against Perplexity's 30.7% in Ahrefs' study of 35,000 sites, but Perplexity returns far more per page it crawls. Cloudflare measured 118 crawls per referral for Perplexity and 887 for OpenAI.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| In the first week of August 2025, OpenAI's crawl-to-refer ratio was 887:1, Perplexity's 118:1 and Anthropic's nearly 50,000:1. | Cloudflare, August 2025 |
| On news and publication sites the ratios were 152:1 for OpenAI and 32.7:1 for Perplexity. | Cloudflare, August 2025 |
| Across about 35,000 websites, ChatGPT sent 50% of AI referral traffic, Perplexity 30.7% and Gemini 17.6%. AI as a whole was 0.1% of total referral traffic. | Ahrefs, March 2025 |
| Across 13,770 domains in 10 industries (May to September 2025), 87.4% of AI referral traffic came from ChatGPT, with Perplexity second. AI referrals were 1.08% of all website traffic. | Conductor, July 2026 |
| After a May 2026 ChatGPT update, 62% to 63% of ChatGPT referrals landed on homepages, up from 26% to 29% before. | Similarweb, 2026 |
Ahrefs gave Perplexity 30.7% of AI referrals and Conductor gave ChatGPT 87.4%. Different site sets, different periods, and both are true for their sample. What doesn't move is the Cloudflare ratio: per page taken, Perplexity sends 7.5 times more visits back than OpenAI. Compare that to its 4.31% share of chatbot page views on Statcounter, a separate dataset with a separate population, and Perplexity punches well above its weight in referrals.
The referral advantage is Perplexity's best argument with publishers. It hasn't stopped them suing.
Why are publishers suing Perplexity?
Publishers are suing Perplexity for copyright infringement because, they allege, its answers reproduce their journalism and substitute for a visit; CNN's May 2026 suit in the Southern District of New York joined earlier cases there from Dow Jones, Britannica, the Chicago Tribune and The New York Times. Perplexity says the suits attack the technology itself and points to its revenue-sharing programmes.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| Dow Jones and the New York Post sued Perplexity in the Southern District of New York on 21 October 2024 (case 1:24-cv-07984). | CourtListener, 2024 |
| Perplexity responded that there were "around three dozen lawsuits by media companies against generative AI tools" and said their common theme was that publishers wish the technology didn't exist. | Perplexity, October 2024 |
| Encyclopaedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster sued Perplexity in the Southern District of New York on 10 September 2025 (case 1:25-cv-07546). | CourtListener, 2025 |
| Amazon sued Perplexity in the Northern District of California on 4 November 2025 (case 3:25-cv-09514) over the Comet browser's shopping agent. | CourtListener, 2025 |
| The Chicago Tribune sued Perplexity in the Southern District of New York on 4 December 2025 (case 1:25-cv-10094), and The New York Times followed on 5 December (case 1:25-cv-10106), just over a year after its cease-and-desist letter. | CourtListener, 2025; CourtListener, 2025; TechCrunch, December 2025 |
| CNN sued Perplexity in the Southern District of New York on 28 May 2026 (case 1:26-cv-04427); CNN described it as the first AI copyright suit by a television network. | CourtListener, 2026 |
| Cloudflare observed Perplexity's declared crawlers making 20 to 25 million requests a day and an undeclared crawler making 3 to 6 million, the latter ignoring robots.txt. ChatGPT's agent stopped when disallowed. | Cloudflare, August 2025 |
| Perplexity's Comet Plus is a $5 monthly subscription that allocates 80% of revenue to participating publishers, based on human visits, search citations and agent actions. | TechCrunch, December 2025; Perplexity, August 2025 |
OpenAI has fought its own New York Times copyright case in the Southern District of New York since December 2023, but it also signed publisher partnerships such as the Hearst deal the Tow Center mentions, where Perplexity offered a revenue share. A share of a $5 subscription is a rounding error to a newsroom, and Cloudflare's stealth-crawler finding handed every plaintiff a story. I think Perplexity's referral ratio is the stronger argument, and it keeps losing that argument in court filings.
The disputes will shape what both engines can cite by 2027. Here is how the four computed numbers were built.
How we calculated the original numbers
Four figures on this page do not appear anywhere else. Here is the arithmetic, so you can check it or swap in newer inputs.
- 83x: ChatGPT prompts per Perplexity query, mid-2025. OpenAI told Axios on 21 July 2025 that ChatGPT handles more than 2.5 billion prompts a day. Srinivas said on 5 June 2025 that Perplexity handles 30 million queries a day. 2,500 / 30 = 83.3. Both are company claims, six weeks apart. A ChatGPT prompt covers every kind of request, writing, coding and chat included, while a Perplexity query is mostly a search, so this compares all ChatGPT prompts with Perplexity queries: a scale gap, not a search-share ratio. Our ChatGPT vs Google page uses the same OpenAI figure the same way, as all prompts. On Perplexity's May 2026 figure (1.5 billion a month, about 50 million a day) the ratio against the 2025 ChatGPT number would be 50x, but ChatGPT has grown since too.
- 7.5x: referrals per crawl, Perplexity vs OpenAI. Cloudflare's first-week-of-August 2025 ratios were 887:1 for OpenAI and 118:1 for Perplexity. 887 / 118 = 7.5. Put another way, Perplexity sent 8.5 referrals per 1,000 pages crawled (1,000 / 118) and OpenAI 1.1 (1,000 / 887). On news sites the gap narrows to 4.6x (152 / 32.7).
- 3.6x: Google top-10 overlap, Perplexity vs ChatGPT. In Ahrefs' August 2025 study of 15,000 long-tail queries (one dataset, collected in early July 2025), 28.6% of Perplexity's cited URLs ranked in Google's top 10, against 8.0% of ChatGPT's in-text citations. 28.6 / 8.0 = 3.6. The 8.0% is the in-text citation figure our ChatGPT vs Google page also uses; against ChatGPT's bottom-of-answer references (6.1%) the gap would be 4.7x.
- 18x: ChatGPT chatbot page views per Perplexity page view, August 2026. Statcounter's worldwide August 2026 shares were 79.4% for ChatGPT and 4.31% for Perplexity. 79.4 / 4.31 = 18.4. In the United States: 72.12 / 3.74 = 19.3. Same tracker, same month, same metric. It measures web page views on Statcounter's network, not app sessions or users.
What the 2026 numbers say
On reach, Perplexity vs ChatGPT isn't a contest. 900 million weekly users, 18 chatbot page views for every Perplexity one, and roughly 83 prompts of every kind for each Perplexity query in mid-2025. Perplexity's 1.5 billion monthly questions are impressive for a startup and small next to the incumbent. Anyone pitching Perplexity as a ChatGPT rival on reach is quoting the wrong table.
Perplexity behaves like a search engine; ChatGPT behaves like an assistant that sometimes searches. Perplexity cites Google's top 10 3.6 times as often, leans on Reddit and YouTube, and returns 7.5 times more visits per crawl. For a publisher or a B2B brand, that makes Perplexity the more predictable channel per query and ChatGPT the bigger one in total.
The legal fight is where Perplexity's model is most exposed. Dow Jones, Britannica, the Chicago Tribune, The New York Times and CNN have all sued it in the Southern District of New York in 19 months, and Amazon sued in the Northern District of California in November 2025 over its shopping agent. Perplexity bet on revenue sharing over licences, and so far the courts, not the referral numbers, are setting the terms.
FAQ
How many users does Perplexity have compared with ChatGPT?
ChatGPT has more than 900 million weekly active users, OpenAI said in February 2026. Perplexity does not publish a global figure; it holds 4.31% of worldwide AI chatbot page views against ChatGPT's 79.4% (Statcounter, August 2026), and Sensor Tower counted nearly 14 million monthly users in India alone in July 2026.
How many queries does Perplexity get per month?
1.5 billion questions a month, according to CNBC's May 2026 profile, up from 780 million in May 2025 (Srinivas at Bloomberg's Tech Summit). ChatGPT users sent more than 2.5 billion prompts a day in July 2025, per OpenAI. That's about 83 prompts of every kind for each Perplexity query at the time, a gap in scale rather than in search share.
Which cites more sources from Google's top 10, Perplexity or ChatGPT?
28.6% of Perplexity's cited URLs rank in Google's top 10, against 8.0% of ChatGPT's, in Ahrefs' August 2025 study of 15,000 queries. Semrush found the same pattern in July 2025, with Perplexity showing over 91% domain overlap with Google's top 10 and ChatGPT tracking Bing more closely.
Does Perplexity send more traffic to websites than ChatGPT?
ChatGPT sends more in total: 50% of AI referrals against Perplexity's 30.7% across 35,000 sites (Ahrefs, March 2025). Per page crawled, Perplexity sends far more back, one referral per 118 crawls against OpenAI's 887 (Cloudflare, August 2025), which works out at 7.5 times more.
What are Perplexity and ChatGPT worth?
$852 billion for OpenAI after its March 2026 round, on $2 billion of monthly revenue, per OpenAI. Perplexity was valued at $20 billion in September 2025, The Information reported, and a source told TechCrunch its ARR was approaching $200 million. Perplexity hasn't confirmed either number, so the two valuations aren't comparable on revenue.
Who is suing Perplexity?
Dow Jones and the New York Post (October 2024), Britannica and Merriam-Webster (September 2025), the Chicago Tribune and The New York Times (December 2025) and CNN (May 2026) have all sued Perplexity for copyright infringement in the Southern District of New York, according to CourtListener dockets. Amazon sued separately in the Northern District of California in November 2025 over Perplexity's shopping agent.
Sources
- OpenAI, Scaling AI for everyone (February 2026)
- OpenAI, OpenAI raises $122 billion to accelerate the next phase of AI (March 2026)
- OpenAI, How people are using ChatGPT (September 2025)
- NBER, How People Use ChatGPT (Working Paper 34255) (September 2025)
- Axios, OpenAI: ChatGPT users send 2.5 billion prompts a day (July 2025)
- TechCrunch, ChatGPT reaches 900M weekly active users (February 2026)
- TechCrunch, Perplexity received 780 million queries last month, CEO says (June 2025)
- TechCrunch, Perplexity reportedly raised $200M at $20B valuation (September 2025)
- TechCrunch, Perplexity's free AI offer left it with millions more users in India (August 2026)
- TechCrunch, The New York Times is suing Perplexity for copyright infringement (December 2025)
- CNBC, Perplexity: 2026 Disruptor 50 (May 2026)
- CNBC, Perplexity CEO tells CNBC one metric will determine who wins the AI race (June 2026)
- Statcounter, AI Chatbot Market Share Worldwide and United States (August 2026)
- Similarweb, AI Search Stats 2026 (June 2026)
- Pew Research Center, 34% of U.S. adults have used ChatGPT (June 2025)
- Profound, AI Platform Citation Patterns (June 2025, updated August 2025)
- Ahrefs: The 10 most mentioned domains for ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews (June 2025); 86% of top mentioned sources are not shared (June 2025); Only 12% of AI cited URLs rank in Google's top 10 (August 2025); AI makes up 0.1% of traffic (March 2025)
- Semrush, AI Mode Comparison Study (July 2025)
- Tow Center for Digital Journalism, We compared eight AI search engines (March 2025)
- Cloudflare: AI crawler traffic by purpose and industry (August 2025); Perplexity is using stealth, undeclared crawlers (August 2025)
- Conductor, The 2026 AEO / GEO Benchmarks Report (July 2026)
- CourtListener dockets: Dow Jones v. Perplexity, 1:24-cv-07984 (October 2024); Encyclopaedia Britannica v. Perplexity, 1:25-cv-07546 (September 2025); Amazon.com Services v. Perplexity, 3:25-cv-09514, N.D. Cal. (November 2025); Chicago Tribune v. Perplexity, 1:25-cv-10094 (December 2025); New York Times v. Perplexity, 1:25-cv-10106 (December 2025); Cable News Network v. Perplexity, 1:26-cv-04427 (May 2026)
- Perplexity: About the Dow Jones lawsuit (October 2024); Introducing Comet Plus (August 2025)
More AI search data sits in the statistics hub.
Methodology. Numbers were collected in September 2026 and checked against the original publisher's page, not against other statistics roundups. Company disclosures from OpenAI and Perplexity are self-reported and labelled as claims with their date and outlet; Perplexity's revenue and valuation come from press reports citing sources, because Perplexity has not published them. Citation studies from Ahrefs, Semrush, Profound and the Tow Center used different prompt sets, so engines are compared only within one study. Where two credible sources disagree (Ahrefs' 30.7% vs Conductor's ChatGPT-dominated 87.4% of AI referrals), both are shown with their sample. Last updated 24 September 2026.