ChatGPT Awareness: The Global Shock Wave
Weekly Google Search interest for “ChatGPT” reveals how AI awareness spread across the globe after the Nov 2022 launch — early in the US and West Africa, later in Southeast Asia.
Each line is one country's search interest in “ChatGPT,” scaled to its own peak. The near-vertical jump after Nov 2022 shows how fast awareness arrived — but it didn't arrive everywhere at once.
Source: Google Trends via pytrends. Index 0–100, each country normalised to its own peak week (100 = maximum interest ever recorded in that country). Click legend labels to toggle countries.
Shock diffusion timeline when each country woke up to ChatGPT — click to expand
Each bar spans from first notable awareness (index ≥ 10) to peak interest. Sorted by earliest awareness. • first awareness • peak
The gap between the two dots is how long a country took to go from first noticing ChatGPT to peak interest. The US and Nigeria moved within weeks; others took the better part of a year.
Source: Google Trends via pytrends. US and Nigeria were first (Dec 2022, within weeks of ChatGPT’s launch); Indonesia last of this group (Sep 2023). All 13 countries peaked in 2025 following subsequent AI product cycles.
Work, Personal & Coursework Use by Country
How the top 10 countries split their AI requests between work, personal, and coursework — and how that mix shifted between Nov 2025 and Feb 2026.
Each bar splits a country's AI requests into work, personal and coursework. Toggle the dates to see the mix shift — work's slice grows in most countries between Nov 2025 and Feb 2026.
Source: Anthropic Economic Index releases Nov 2025 & Feb 2026. Country-level use-case breakdown. Top 10 countries by average Claude.ai usage share.
Directive vs. Learning: How AI Collaboration Has Shifted
Global share of each interaction mode across all five releases. Directive use surged through Aug 2025 then stabilised; learning has grown steadily since.
Tracks how people work with AI over five releases. Directive use (telling AI what to do) leads, but the steady climb in learning suggests people increasingly use AI to understand, not just to execute.
Source: All 5 AEI releases. Global aggregate. Directive = AI executes user instructions. Learning = user asks AI to explain or teach. Task iteration = back-and-forth refinement.
Country Trends Explorer
Select any country to see how its directive and learning collaboration styles evolved across three observation windows (Aug 2025, Nov 2025, Feb 2026). The dashed lines show the global average.
Pick a country to see whether its people lean more on AI to do (directive) or to learn, and how that's changed. The dashed lines are the global average for comparison.
Source: AEI releases Aug 2025, Nov 2025, Feb 2026. Country-level collaboration mode breakdown. Dashed = global average for that release.