Analysis of Global ChatGPT Usage Patterns Based on a 20‑Million‑Device Clickstream Survey

Since ChatGPT was launched at the end of last year, it has attracted attention from the tech community, mainstream media, and professionals across various industries. People are discussing how ChatGPT will affect their work, whether AI will replace them, and whether Hollywood screenwriters, real‑estate agents, and others are still needed.

To answer these questions, SparkToro partnered with Datos, which operates a privacy‑compliant click‑stream panel of 20 million devices (desktop and mobile) covering over 200 countries, providing deep insight into real users’ online behavior.

The survey analyzed ChatGPT usage across several aspects:

Is ChatGPT usage increasing? According to traffic data from OpenAI.com, the site’s traffic fell 29.15 % from May to July. This does not necessarily mean interest or usage of AI is decreasing; possible reasons include:

Professional or regular users continue at a high level or are growing; only new users or users without specific tasks have decreased.

A large portion of usage is related to school assignments, so usage in the US, Canada and other countries dropped during the summer break.

What tasks do people mainly use ChatGPT for? SparkToro obtained more than 7,000 real user requests to ChatGPT from Datos and filtered the most relevant 4,098. By using ChatGPT’s own topic classification on these requests, the following results were obtained:

Programming is the most common use case, accounting for 29.14 % of all Q&A. This is the clearest scenario: ChatGPT is used to help write specific code, format code, find code errors, etc.

Education is the second largest use case, encompassing not only primary or secondary education but also personal knowledge or interest exploration and professional knowledge searches for work.

Content creation is the third largest use case, with some requests being personal and others professional.

Sales and marketing use cases overlap with content creation, but they are separated to view conversations that are solely about assisting sales and marketing professionals with tasks such as data analysis, channel promotion decisions, ad‑optimization tasks, or informational/promotional assistance.

The project also analyzed the most common words in ChatGPT request sessions; “Write”, “Create”, and “List” rank in the top three, as shown in the following figure: