OpenAI: ChatGPT's audience surged among users 35 and older in early 2026

OpenAI recorded a sharp widening of ChatGPT's audience in the first quarter of 2026. The service is still growing fast, but it is now used not only by early enthusiasts but by a broader mainstream audience, across age, gender and geography.

Who joined ChatGPT

The main shift in Q1 2026 was the acceleration among users over 35. People under 35 still generate the largest share of messages, but the older audience increased its share faster this quarter. This is an important signal: the product is ceasing to be a tool mainly for students, IT workers and early adopters, and is becoming a familiar service for a broader everyday audience.

Gender balance is another marker of the mass-market shift. Users with names that OpenAI classifies as typically feminine continued to increase their share of ChatGPT usage, after the distribution approached parity last year. They now account for more than half of the users for whom such an estimate can be made at all. This is not a complete cross-section of the whole audience, but the trend shows the service is becoming less skewed toward a typically technical, male base.

New growth markets

Growth is visible beyond the largest and most mature markets. OpenAI compares countries by messages per capita and tracks how their positions change from quarter to quarter. In the first quarter of 2026, the fastest climbs in the ranking came from markets outside the usual core. Countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, the Asia-Pacific region and Africa stood out in particular.

• Dominican Republic rose from 53rd to 44th place
• Haiti, from 91st to 82nd
• Japan, from 43rd to 35th
• Mexico, from 60th to 54th
• Brazil, from 47th to 42nd

It is important to note that this is not a list of countries with the largest absolute traffic. It shows where ChatGPT gained relative usage density faster. The same list includes Tanzania, Costa Rica, Myanmar, Papua New Guinea and Austria. In other words, growth depends less and less on a few very large markets and is increasingly spread across regions where the product is becoming part of the everyday digital routine.

How work is changing

Separately, OpenAI looked at work scenarios within consumer plans: Free, Go, Plus and Pro. There is an important limitation: the analysis excludes Codex and enterprise and education products, so real-world work use of AI is broader than these figures show. But even on consumer accounts, ChatGPT is increasingly used not occasionally but for repeatable tasks.

Creating text and visual materials still leads, but its share is declining over time as interest grows in more specialized scenarios. The fastest-growing work tasks were content preparation, health-related documentation, and information search and retrieval. The balance between work and non-work use on personal accounts remained broadly in line with previous quarters, but the work scenarios themselves became steadier and more regular.

• Preparing text and visuals remains the largest use case
• Specialized tasks are growing faster than general ones
• Scenarios involving health-related documentation are strengthening
• Personal accounts increasingly serve for repeatable work

What this means

Q1 2026 shows ChatGPT going through its next stage of maturing: from a product for curious and advanced users to a mass-market tool with stable use cases. For the market, this means two things at once: new users are arriving from a broader demographic, and existing ones are starting to build the service into regular work. When both processes run in parallel, a platform usually settles in not as an experiment but as a basic digital layer.