The Most Common ChatGPT Prompts by Category
What are people really asking ChatGPT?
With adoption growing, ChatGPT prompts are shifting as consumer behavior evolves. While software development prompts continue to dominate, their share has fallen meaningfully over the past year, reflecting how developers were among the earliest users of ChatGPT for code and other applications.
This graphic shows the most popular ChatGPT prompt categories, based on data from Sensor Tower.
What the World Is Asking ChatGPT in 2025
Published 1 day ago on July 11, 2025
By Dorothy Neufeld
See this visualization first on the Voronoi app.
Voronoi showing the top categories of ChatGPT prompts in 2025.
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The Most Common ChatGPT Prompts by Category
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Key Takeaways
In under two years, ChatGPT has gained 500 million monthly active users (MAUs).
Software development queries are the top prompt category, with a 29% share, although it has fallen from 44% in April 2024.
History and society is the second-most popular category, at 15% of prompts, up from 13% in April 2024.
What are people really asking ChatGPT?
With adoption growing, ChatGPT prompts are shifting as consumer behavior evolves. While software development prompts continue to dominate, their share has fallen meaningfully over the past year, reflecting how developers were among the earliest users of ChatGPT for code and other applications.
This graphic shows the most popular ChatGPT prompt categories, based on data from Sensor Tower.
Top Categories for ChatGPT Prompts in 2025
Below, we show the leading prompt categories on ChatGPT between March and April 2025:
Covering 29% of all prompts, software development is the top category for ChatGPT users.
Along with simplifying coding tasks across multiple programming languages, ChatGPT can help debug and automate tasks. A separate study found that early coders (those with under a year of coding experience) were most likely to be AI optimists among coders.
History and society prompts were the second-most common type of prompt, at 15% of the total share. Meanwhile, AI and machine learning prompts followed closely behind.
Interestingly, the fastest-growing category was economics, finance and tax—with its share jumping more than threefold in a year as users increasingly look for insights on stocks, financial markets, and macroeconomic trends.