LLM Searches and Shared Value

Issue 137 l Eka’s Weekly Roundup (26 September 2025)

Sep 26, 2025

Ben Evans reposted two documents on consumer LLM usage in his latest newsletter - one from OpenAI, and one from Anthropic. I love this data because it gives us insights into what consumers value, where they are spending time, and how they are searching.

One learning is that at the core of queries tend to be Shared Value themes. For example:

Provide comprehensive cooking, nutrition, and meal planning assistance
Provide personal relationship advice and life guidance support
Provide comprehensive medical and healthcare guidance across multiple specialties.

This week, we’re going through the two underlying documents and seeing what consumers are looking for on LLMs.

>700m people use ChatGPT on a weekly basis 🗞️

ChatGPT had >700m weekly active users as of September ‘25. For the eagle eyed watches, you’ll remember that there had been rumours of the 1b WAU (weekly active user) mark earlier this year, but this looks to not have been reached (yet).

Usage is increasing. The black solid line shows that between July 2024 and July 2025, the number of messages sent grew by a more than 5x. Most of this looks to be driven by increasing frequency of newly acquired customers.

Anthropic doesn’t share the same high level scale data, but it does share usage by geography, both absolute and basically per capita. On the absolute view, the United States accounts for the highest share (22%), with the next highest usage countries showing significantly lower shares (India at 7%, Brazil at 4%).

On the per capita view (and technically its per capita of the working age population which I think is interesting given the focus on Claude and economically useful work, but also because it likely excludes students which have been well reported to use a LOT of ChatGPT), then Israel leads “Anthropic AI Usage Index” of 7. In other words, its working-age population uses Claude 7x more than expected based on its population.

So that rounds off general usage trends. How about search content / themes?

What are people asking (ChatGPT)?

The OpenAI paper found that “Practical Guidance” is the most common reason people use ChatGPT, accounting for 29% of messages across a sample of >1m conversations. What counts as “practical”? Tutoring and teaching makes up 10.2%, how-to advice: 8.5%, health, fitness, self-care: 5.7%, and finally creative ideation: 3.9%.

The biggest change has been in work vs. non-work messages. The OpenAI paper found that non-work-related messages grew from 53% to more than 70% of all usage (from early launch to mid ‘25). Going back to Anthropic, it feels like there are these two narratives of ‘pureplay consumer’ and ‘economically productive’ work here.