• by Laurie Sullivan , Yesterday

OpenAI released GPT-5, the fifth generation of its artificial intelligence technology that powers ChatGPT.

This version arrived more than two years after the March 2023 release of OpenAI’s last model, putting into question for advertisers how it would change search and the way AI chat and agentic agents supports brands.

Microsoft on Thursday said it has incorporated GPT-5 into Copilot, its own AI assistant.

For users with Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses, GPT-5 will appear in calendar, emails, chats, documents, meetings and contacts.

Copilot takes prompts, understands it, and uses GPT-5’s real-time router to choose the best model to reason over the prompt and craft a response. It can prioritize speed, using GPT-5’s smart, high-throughput model to craft quick, succinct responses to straightforward questions.

For complex or more open-ended questions, GPT-5 will help Copilot detect that the prompt requires advanced reasoning. In those cases, it will use deeper reasoning model, taking its time to craft a plan, gather and comprehend all relevant context, and check its work before providing a thorough response.

AI market share skews toward OpenAI use. BrightEdge July 2025 data shows that ChatGPT leads in terms of user growth compared with rival AI engines referrals to websites.

Google still maintains an overall share of the market at approximately 90%, but ChatGPT holds more than 21% market share month over month; Claude holds 21%; and Perplexity holds about 19%. The data was pulled from BrightEdge customers across key industries, organization sizes, and geographic locations between July and August 2025.

The data also reveals that ChatGPT user agent activity surged 200% in July. ChatGPT bots nearly doubled their activity, showing users relying on real-time web searches to answer questions almost doubled within just one month.

One of the more interesting findings advertisers should know reflects the number of pages requested from ChatGPT on behalf of users—about 33% of the level of actual users going to pages from organic search. It actively crawls websites to build its search index at the same level as Google desktop.

BrightEdge data shows that ChatGPT bots facilitate real-user activities in ways BrightEdge analysts have never seen before, and blocking them doesn't just impact search engine optimization strategies, it could impact user engagement and website functions when consumers are increasingly relying on AI to guide their purchasing decisions.

"What we're seeing is a fundamental shift in how information gets discovered and consumed,” said Jim Yu, founder and CEO of BrightEdge, adding that AI agents are here, they are not coming. “These agents are interacting with websites and serving content to users in real-time conversations. The bottom line: Agentic website activity is going mainstream, reflecting a fundamental shift in AI strategy from assistants to interactive user/site agents."

Rival Anthropic released the latest version of Claude, its own chatbot, earlier in the week in a race to compete with OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, DeepSeek and others.