AI/News
The median ChatGPT user in a 5,000-person panel sends 36 messages a month, up from 14 in 2023, and the top 10% send 63% of all prompts, Epoch AI finds
Epoch AI's new usage explorer is built on the chat histories of 5,000 US YouGov panellists - 8.3 million messages - with the text stripped out. The panel is opt-in, older than ChatGPT's user base and only includes people still using it in 2026, so it shows how use intensified, not how many people use it.
By Daily Aletheia · Checked against the primary source · 1 October 2026 · 2 min read
Epoch AI launched its ChatGPT usage explorer on 1 October, built on data YouGov collected from 5,000 US panellists who used ChatGPT in 2026 and agreed to share their chat exports. The exports, made between January and August 2026, hold about 8.3 million messages across about 660,000 conversations; some histories run back to the weeks after ChatGPT's launch in November 2022.
What is in it
YouGov removed all message text before handing the data over. What remains for each message is when it was sent, its character count, which model replied and which tools the model used. From that the explorer publishes nine metrics, monthly and weekly, all downloadable under a Creative Commons licence. It does not classify topics or use cases.
What Epoch found
The median number of messages per active panellist, counting prompts and replies, rose from 14 in January 2023 to 36 in December 2025. The mean was 158, because a small group of heavy users accounts for most of the traffic: the most active 10% of panellists sent 63% of prompts.
Frequent use spread. Between December 2023 and December 2025 the share of active panellists who used ChatGPT on only one day in the month fell from 32.6% to 22.1%, and the share using it on 21 or more days quadrupled, from 2.6% to 10.5%. The typical conversation did not get longer - the median has been two prompts in every month but one - while the mean rose from 3.7 prompts in December 2022 to 5.8 in December 2025, and the median panellist's conversations per month rose from three to five.
The caveats Epoch states
The panel is opt-in and unweighted, and everyone in it had to have used ChatGPT in 2026, so people who tried it and stopped are absent. Epoch says that survivorship bias pushes usage up over time and makes the data informative about change within this panel, not about how many Americans use ChatGPT. The panel is older than ChatGPT's user base (14% under 30, against 29% in Epoch's March survey of recent users) and more college-educated than US adults (55% against 40%). Its rates of use do track OpenAI's own figures: 4.3 prompts a day per weekly active panellist in July 2025 against about 3.7 implied by OpenAI's published numbers, and 5.6x growth in prompt volume from June 2024 to June 2025 against OpenAI's 5.8x.