Within months of its launch in late 2022, ChatGPT reached 100 million weekly users. By late 2025, that figure had grown to 800 million — making it one of the most widely used consumer technologies on the planet. Research shows this shift isn’t just curiosity: a 2025 Pew Research Center study found that 34% of U.S. adults now use AI tools regularly for everyday information tasks. A U.S. consumer survey found that 55% of respondents now turn to ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini for queries they previously gave to Google Search. Traditional search engines remain dominant, but the kind of searching people do has shifted. Meanwhile, Google has responded by embedding AI-generated summaries at the top of search results — contributing to a surge in ‘zero-click’ searches, where users never visit a website. This academic analysis explores how ChatGPT has fundamentally reshaped consumer information behaviour in just three years.
The ChatGPT Effect: In Three Years, AI Has Become the New Front Door to Information
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