Microsoft’s Bing Tops 100 Million Users With ChatGPT Integration

ChatGPT has helped Microsoft’s Bing search engine reach 100 million daily active users. 

Microsoft announced(Opens in a new window) the news a month after the company integrated OpenAI’s chatbot program into Bing, which has long struggled to chip away at Google Search’s market share.

The ChatGPT integration with Bing is still in preview mode and accessible via a waitlist. But even so, Microsoft has seen a “million+” preview users routinely try the new Bing over the past month. 

Bing still faces a huge uphill battle against Google, which has over a billion users. “We are fully aware we remain a small, low, single digit share player,” says Microsoft Consumer Chief Marketing Officer Yusuf Mehdi. “That said, it feels good to be at the dance!”

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“Of the millions of active users of the new Bing preview, it’s great to see that roughly one third are new to Bing,” he adds. In addition, the search engine is also experiencing higher engagement due to users repeatedly interacting with ChatGPT-powered Bing. 

“Roughly one third of daily preview users are using Chat daily,” Mehdi says. “We’re seeing on average, roughly three chats per session with more than 45 million total chats since the preview began. And 15 percent of Chat sessions are people using Bing to generate new content demonstrating we are extending search to creativity.” 

(Credit: Bing.com)

The big question is when Microsoft will release the new Bing to the wider public, which could lead to even more growth. About three weeks ago, the company decided to muzzle the AI-powered Bing’s capabilities after journalists and users encountered the program making bizarre responses during long conversations.  

Microsoft is now slowly easing(Opens in a new window) restrictions on Bing, enabling people to conduct up to 10 chat turns per session and 120 chat turns per day. The company has also added a creative conversation style to Bing while rolling out the preview experience to mobile devices. 

In the meantime, OpenAI’s own ChatGPT implementation remains free and open for anyone to use. In a bit of irony, ChatGPT has become so popular that the site has surpassed Microsoft’s main Bing domain in terms of user traffic, according(Opens in a new window) to analytics company SimilarWeb. 

(Credit: SimilarWeb)

“The chat.openai.com website attracted more than 1 billion visits in February, up 62.5% from 616 million in January,” SimilarWeb says. “The main bing.com domain attracted 831 million visits worldwide in February.” However, if you include Bing’s other domains, both services attract about the same user traffic.