UK ChatGPT Usage Statistics 2026

How many UK adults use ChatGPT?

33% of UK internet users aged 16+ have used ChatGPT in the past year, according to Ofcom Online Nation 2024. Applied to the ONS mid-2024 UK adult population, this equates to approximately 19.3 million UK adults — making ChatGPT the most-used generative AI tool in the country by a wide margin.

A separate measure published by IAB UK using UKOM Ipsos iris panel data put the number of UK monthly visitors to chatgpt.com at 16.0 million by September 2025. The two figures measure different things — past-year self-reported reach versus monthly active panel measurement — but both establish ChatGPT as a mainstream UK consumer service rather than an early-adopter tool.

A note on framing: Ofcom's Adults' Media Use and Attitudes 2026 report finds that 54% of UK adults have used "AI tools such as ChatGPT, Copilot or Gemini" in the past year. This is a combined "any AI chatbot" figure, not ChatGPT-specific, and it should not be cited as a ChatGPT reach number.

ChatGPT has more UK reach than Copilot, Snapchat AI and Gemini combined

Ofcom's Online Nation 2024 ranks UK chatbot reach in a clear hierarchy: ChatGPT 33%, Microsoft Copilot 15%, Snapchat My AI 13%, Google Gemini 10%. Even setting aside double-counting from users who tried more than one chatbot, ChatGPT's lead over the second-placed service is wider than the combined reach of the third and fourth competitors.

The web-traffic picture is even more skewed. UKOM's monthly Ipsos iris panel for July 2025 puts chatgpt.com's UK audience at 15.1 million visitors against just 2.5 million for Microsoft Copilot — a 6-to-1 lead that grew further by September 2025 when ChatGPT crossed 16 million UK monthly users. By Similarweb's estimate, ChatGPT now accounts for the lion's share of all generative-AI web traffic worldwide.

How fast is UK ChatGPT use growing?

UK web visits to chatgpt.com grew 156% year-on-year to 252 million in August 2025, according to Similarweb data published in Ofcom's Online Nation 2025. The cumulative picture is even sharper: 1.8 billion UK ChatGPT visits in January-August 2025, against 368 million in the same period of 2024 — a 389% increase.

Other AI services grew strongly from much smaller bases: Google Gemini was up 146% in UK web visits over the same period, Anthropic's Claude up 138%, Perplexity up 100%, and Brave Search up 37%. ChatGPT is growing in absolute terms faster than all of them combined.

Who uses ChatGPT in the UK? Demographic breakdown

UK ChatGPT use is sharply skewed by age. Ofcom Online Nation 2024 found that 78% of UK 18-24-year-olds had used a generative AI tool in the past year, against only 14% of those aged 65 and over. For ChatGPT specifically, 27% of UK 18-24-year-olds visited chatgpt.com in May 2024, the highest reach of any age group.

A gender gap is also visible: 50% of UK men have used a generative AI tool in the past year, against 33% of UK women. The gap narrows among under-35s but widens again above age 45.

UK adults use ChatGPT most for information, but trust it least for information

Ofcom's 2024 generative AI module asked UK genAI users what they used the tools for. The top answers were "finding information or content" (48%) and "for fun" (48%), followed by work tasks (33%), studies (25%), and seeking advice (22%). Creative tasks like generating poems or lyrics scored 20%, image generation 20%, and coding 11%.

The notable disconnect is that despite information-seeking being the most common use case, only 18% of UK genAI users say they consider the information from generative AI to be reliable. 21% explicitly distrust the results, and 61% are neutral. The gap between use and trust is one of the strongest signals in the UK ChatGPT data.

Do UK students and workers use ChatGPT differently?

UK university students are now the most intensive ChatGPT users in the country. The HEPI / Kortext Student Generative AI Survey 2025, polling 1,041 full-time UK undergraduates in December 2024, found that 92% had used generative AI tools in their academic year, up from 66% the year before. 88% used it for assessments — up from 53% in 2024 — and 18% admitted to including AI-generated text directly in their submitted work.

Use among UK workers is more measured. A Tony Blair Institute survey of 3,727 UK adults (May–June 2025, cited by DSIT) found that 23% of UK workers use generative AI tools at least weekly at work, while 19% use them at least weekly in their personal life. Nearly half — 47% — had not used any generative AI tool at all in the past 12 months. Risk perception splits sharply by use: 56% of non-users see generative AI as a societal risk, against only 26% of weekly users.

ChatGPT is the UK's most popular AI tool for personal finance

The Lloyds Consumer Digital Index 2025 — the UK's largest annual study of digital and financial capability — found that 56% of UK adults (around 28.8 million people) used AI tools in the past 12 months to help manage their money. ChatGPT was the most popular platform, used by six in ten of those AI users — equating to roughly 17 million UK adults using ChatGPT for personal finance specifically.

Of UK AI-finance users, 56% use it for budgeting and savings advice, 39% for retirement planning, 37% for investment research, and 26% for debt management. Lloyds estimates the average UK AI user saves £399 per year by acting on AI-driven advice, although 83% of those users also worry about data privacy and 80% about inaccurate or outdated information.

What the UK ChatGPT data tells us about AI search behaviour

Two findings reframe how UK marketers should think about AI search. First: ChatGPT is now described in Ofcom's Online Nation 2025 as "the second-largest search service" in the UK after Google — a substantive shift in how the regulator categorises the product. Second: while UK adults visit ChatGPT at scale, their frequency of use is markedly lower than in the US. Reuters Institute data shows 7% of US adults use ChatGPT daily versus only 2% of UK adults, even though "ever used" rates are roughly equal at 33–34%.

The implication: in the UK, the question is less whether your audience has tried ChatGPT and more how often they reach for it instead of Google. The 156% year-on-year UK visit growth and the 6-to-1 lead over Copilot suggest the answer is changing fast — and brands that already rank well in conventional search results need a parallel strategy for being cited by ChatGPT itself.

That work — what the industry has started calling generative engine optimisation (GEO) — is rapidly becoming a core part of UK search marketing rather than a fringe technique for brands whose audience skews under 45.

For deeper data on this shift, see shifts in UK AI search and the broader UK search engine market share data showing Google's referrer share has fallen below 92% for the first time since 2018.

Wolfstone analysis: estimated UK ChatGPT users by nation

Ofcom does not publish ChatGPT reach broken out by England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Wolfstone derives a composite estimate by applying Ofcom's 33% past-year ChatGPT reach (Online Nation 2024) to ONS mid-2024 population estimates aged 16+ for each UK nation. The result: an estimated 19.3 million UK ChatGPT users in the past year, including approximately 16.4 million in England, 1.5 million in Scotland, 0.9 million in Wales, and 0.5 million in Northern Ireland.