February '25 trends and news roundup
OpenAI is unstoppable, SEO for AI agents, Google’s surprising position in Shopping, and more.
Welcome to the February roundup of important news and trends, including OpenAI’s unstoppable force, SEO for AI agents, Google’s surprising position in Shopping and more.
AI
OpenAI tops 400 weekly active users
OpenAI’s weekly active users grew 33% in the last 3 months to over 400 million. The recent PR wave of DeepSeek seems to have had no effect on Chat GPT (Nvidia’s stock also recovered from the -17% plunge). Point in case is that paid subs are also up: 2 million users pay, up 2x from September, developer traffic is also up 2x.
OpenAI runs the classic freemium strategy: attract free users, gate usage, watch enterprise subscribers grow. HOWEVER, in my experience, freemium works as a way to enter the market, but hardly to win it. Eventually, all freemium companies go upmarket and need to hire large sales teams to win. Maybe that’s why Chat GPT Search is now free for everyone.
OpenAI ungated Chat GPT Search, meaning it’s now also available to logged-out users. That move pulls even with Perplexity, which doesn’t require a login, and positions Chat GPT closer to Google/Bing.