800 million people use ChatGPT every week. What are they asking about your company?
In October 2025, OpenAI reported 800 million weekly active users on ChatGPT. That number has likely grown since. For context, that's more than Twitter/X, LinkedIn, and Reddit combined.
The question isn't whether candidates use AI to research employers. It's what AI tells them when they do.
The numbers that matter
800M weekly active ChatGPT users (OpenAI, Oct 2025)
1B monthly Meta AI users across WhatsApp and Instagram (Meta, Q1 2025)
13.5% of ChatGPT conversations are information-seeking queries (NBER, Sep 2025)
60% of Google searches result in zero clicks (SparkToro, 2024)
25% predicted decline in traditional search by 2026 (Gartner, 2024)
That 13.5% figure is critical. An NBER working paper categorised ChatGPT usage and found that over one in eight conversations are the kind of query that used to go to Google — factual questions, research, comparisons. "What's the salary at [company]?" falls squarely in this category.
The AI adoption timeline
It's worth understanding how quickly this shift has happened:
ChatGPT launches. 1M users in 5 days.
100M monthly users. Fastest-growing consumer app in history.
Google launches AI Overviews in search results. Zero-click rate accelerates.
800M weekly ChatGPT users. Meta AI reaches 1B MAU. AI is mainstream.
AI is the primary research tool for a growing share of job seekers. Employer brands that aren't AI-visible are losing candidates they never see.
What candidates actually ask
Based on our analysis of audit queries and public AI usage data, the most common employer-related prompts fall into predictable categories:
Compensation: "What does [company] pay for [role]?" — 34% of employer queries
Culture: "What's it like to work at [company]?" — 28%
Benefits: "What benefits does [company] offer?" — 18%
Remote policy: "Does [company] allow remote work?" — 12%
Comparison: "[Company A] vs [Company B] for engineers" — 8%
Notice that salary is the number one query. If AI is hallucinating your salary data, it's affecting the largest share of candidate queries about you.
The compounding problem
AI models don't just answer questions — they shape perception at scale. When 800 million people have access to a tool that confidently answers employer questions, and that tool is working from incomplete or incorrect data, the misinformation compounds.
A wrong salary estimate doesn't just affect one candidate. It affects every candidate who asks the same question — potentially thousands per month for well-known employers.
And unlike a bad review on a traditional platform (which you can respond to publicly), an AI hallucination is invisible to you. You don't know it's happening until you check.
What you can do today
The employers winning in this new landscape are the ones who treat AI visibility like they treat SEO — as a measurable, improvable channel. Three actions:
1. Audit your AI presence
Find out what AI actually says about you right now. Not what you assume — what it actually says.
2. Publish machine-readable data
Create an llms.txt file, add JSON-LD to your careers page, and publish salary ranges in your job listings.
3. Monitor weekly
AI models retrain regularly. What they say about you changes. Weekly monitoring catches inaccuracies before candidates see them.
Sources
- OpenAI — 800M weekly active users (Oct 2025)
- Meta Investors — Meta AI 1B MAU (Q1 2025)
- NBER Working Paper 34255 — ChatGPT usage categorisation (Sep 2025)
- SparkToro — Zero-click search study (2024)
- Gartner — 25% search volume decline prediction (Feb 2024)