OpenAI’s generative artificial intelligence service ChatGPT has shown explosive growth in South Korea’s mobile market, quickly rising to the status of a “national app.” With monthly active users surpassing 23 million, it has outpaced most domestic platforms in both absolute user numbers and growth rate, trailing only Google and Chrome. The outlook that the existing portal-centric search market will be reorganized around AI platforms is gaining traction.
According to a survey released on the 15th by app and retail analysis service Wiseapp·Retail, targeting South Korean Android and iOS smartphone users, ChatGPT’s average monthly users in the first half of this year (January to June) totaled 23.24 million. This is an increase of a staggering 9.86 million compared to the same period last year, marking the fastest growth among all mobile apps.
During the same period, the second-largest increase was recorded by Setlog (7.33 million), followed by Google’s AI assistant Gemini (6.81 million). Rounding out the top gainers were Digital Onnuri (3.63 million), Naver Plus Store (3.59 million), Google (3.47 million), Block Blast (2.75 million), Kakao Pay (2.49 million), Spotify (2.22 million), Monimo (1.94 million), TikTok (1.91 million), TikTok Lite (1.85 million), Coupang Eats (1.81 million), Chrome (1.55 million), and Daiso Mall (1.51 million).
ChatGPT’s presence was also prominent in absolute user scale. Based on average monthly users in the first half of this year, Google (46.95 million) and Google Chrome (43.03 million) took first and second place, while ChatGPT ranked third with 23.24 million users. This significantly outpaced Coupang Eats (12.84 million), Kakao Pay (11.05 million), TikTok (9.49 million), Naver Plus Store (8.07 million), and Gemini (7.79 million).
The rapid advance of generative AI is also confirmed in search market surveys. In a poll by market research firm OpenSurvey asking about experiences using generative AI as a search service within the last three months, the response rate for using Google Gemini was 52.2%. This is a sharp 23.3 percentage point surge from 28.9% in December of last year. During the same period, ChatGPT’s usage rate also rose by 3.6 percentage points, from 54.5% to 58.1%.
However, Naver’s stronghold remains solid in information exploration areas closely tied to daily life. For news and issue searches, 60.5% of respondents said they access Naver first, and for local and shopping information searches, 67.1% chose Naver as their primary gateway. In contrast, only 3.5% and 8.4% of respondents, respectively, said they use generative AI services first for the same categories, demonstrating that Naver’s competitiveness remains overwhelming in ecosystems involving daily-life content and services.
In response, Naver officially launched its conversational search feature, the “AI Tab,” last month to directly confront the challenge from generative AI. The AI Tab is characterized by its action-prediction capabilities that go beyond simply providing answers to questions, understanding user intent to connect them to services like venue reservations or product purchases.
An information technology (IT) industry insider commented, “Just as messengers like KakaoTalk changed daily life in the early days of smartphones, AI has now quietly established itself as a default app.” The insider forecasted that “the existing portal-centric search market will now be reorganized around AI platforms.”
The survey results suggest that the initiative in the mobile platform market is rapidly shifting from traditional search and social media to AI agents. The fact that ChatGPT and Gemini both ranked high in growth indicates that generative AI has moved beyond being a novel technology experience to become an everyday utility tool for search, translation, document writing, learning, and work assistance. In response to this trend, domestic South Korean platforms are also taking action: Naver is accelerating its transition to AI-centric services, while Kakao is continuously expanding its AI-based offerings.