What were the top 10 questions asked of ChatGPT in 2025?
What were the top 10 questions asked of ChatGPT in 2025?
Spoiler: they’re mostly “make this easier,” not “take over the world.”
Big Picture Framing
When people talk about the top questions asked of ChatGPT in 2025, they’re really asking: “What did millions of humans quietly worry about, struggle with, and hope for this year?” With ChatGPT now among the most-visited sites on the planet, its question stream is a kind of X-ray of everyday modern life. Wikipedia
How to read this “top 10”
There’s no official public leaderboard of the exact queries, but across reports, usage analyses, and real-world behavior, clear patterns emerge: writing help, “explain this simply,” how-to guidance, and curiosity about AI itself dominate. VERTU® Official Site+1 Think of this list as a reconstructed “greatest hits” album based on the data we do have, plus the kinds of prompts platforms highlight. It won’t capture every meme prompt, but it does reveal what people actually used ChatGPT for in 2025.
First, a quick reality check (and why this is a reconstruction)
OpenAI and other providers don’t publish a global, ranked list of exact word-for-word prompts for privacy and safety reasons. So you won’t find an official chart that says, “#1 question: ‘Write my resignation email,’ used 18,294,223 times.” What we do have are aggregated use-case breakdowns and articles summarizing the most common ways people use ChatGPT: drafting and improving writing, brainstorming, summarizing long text, asking “how-to” questions, learning support, and questions about AI itself. VERTU® Official Site+1
So when we talk about the “top 10 questions,” we’re really talking about the 10 question patterns that showed up everywhere: across user stories, product marketing, media coverage, and usage research. Think of them like search categories on Google—no one types the query exactly the same way, but they rhyme.
The 10 questions people kept asking ChatGPT in 2025
Here’s the plausible top-10 list, phrased the way people actually tend to type them.
- “Can you write or improve this email/message for me?”
Writing assistance is consistently reported as the #1 use case: emails, outreach, reviews, internal updates, customer replies. Users paste rough drafts and ask ChatGPT to “make this clearer, more polite, more concise, more confident,” or “adapt this for my boss/client/team.” VERTU® Official Site - “Explain [concept] like I’m 5 / like I’m new to this.”
From “Explain quantum computing like I’m 12” to “Explain my health insurance benefits like I’m 5,” people lean on ChatGPT as a patient explainer, not just a search engine. The “ELI5” pattern is one of the cleanest examples of how AI bridges expert language and everyday understanding. - “Summarize this for me: [paste article/report/transcript].”
Long PDFs, meeting transcripts, research papers, legal docs—2025 was the year everyone decided they did not have time to read everything. Summarization, key takeaways, bullet-point briefs, and “TL;DR in 5 bullets” show up again and again as core use cases. VERTU® Official Site - “Give me ideas for [project/content/strategy].”
Idea generation—names, taglines, hooks, campaign ideas, workshop formats—has become a staple. Instead of staring at a blank page, people ask things like “Give me 20 podcast episode ideas about remote leadership” or “Brainstorm 10 product name ideas for a budgeting app.” - “How do I [practical task] step by step?”
These are the new “how-to” queries: “How do I write a resignation letter?”, “How do I set up a budget in Excel?”, “How do I talk to my manager about a promotion?” ChatGPT functions like a more conversational, tailored version of a how-to article. VERTU® Official Site+1 - “Help me study/learn: create a plan, quiz, or explanation for [topic].”
Students, career switchers, and lifelong learners ask for study plans, concept checks, flashcards, and practice questions: “Create a 4-week study plan for the GRE,” “Quiz me on SQL joins,” “Explain this code snippet and then test me on it.” - “Is this real / safe / a scam?”
As phishing and online fraud rise, people paste suspicious emails, job offers, DMs, or screenshots and ask some version of: “Is this legit?” While ChatGPT can’t see everything or guarantee safety, the pattern reflects a growing instinct to use AI as a second pair of eyes on risky content. - “Act as a [role] and help me with [task].”
The “act as…” pattern—“Act as a career coach,” “Act as a product manager,” “Act as my French tutor”—became a standard way to frame complex tasks. It’s shorthand for “adopt this perspective and constraints, then respond accordingly,” and it underpins tons of real-world workflows. - “What can you do / not do? How do you actually work?”
Curiosity about AI itself is a top category: “What are your limitations?”, “How private are my chats?”, “How are people using ChatGPT best?” These questions show up in FAQs, cheat sheets, and media pieces that explain the tool to newcomers. tekbro.ng+1 - “Turn this into something better: rewrite, reformat, or translate.”
A huge cluster: “Rewrite this in a more professional tone,” “Turn this bullet list into a slide outline,” “Translate this email into Spanish,” “Shorten this to 200 words.” It’s all the same underlying move: “Here’s raw material—make it better for a specific purpose.”
A day in the life: one real-world example
Picture a product manager on a Tuesday:
- 8:30 AM – Pastes a messy Slack draft and asks: “Make this short, clear, and friendly for my engineering team.”
- 10:00 AM – Uploads meeting notes: “Summarize the decisions, action items, and risks in 10 bullets.”
- 2:00 PM – Asks: “Explain RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) like I’m new to AI, then give me a two-sentence way to describe it to executives.”
- 4:30 PM – Types: “Act as a recruiter. Give me 5 behavioral interview questions for a senior PM and ideal answers.”
Those four interactions alone hit half of our “top 10” patterns. Multiply that by millions of professionals, students, and creators, and you start to see why these question types dominate.
What this list actually reveals about us (not just the AI)
Look carefully and a theme jumps out: most top ChatGPT questions are about reducing friction. We’re offloading the hard, slow parts of knowledge work—first drafts, explanations, summaries, and ideation—so we can focus on judgment, relationships, and decisions.
Another pattern: we use AI as a thinking partner more than a crystal ball. None of the top questions are “Tell me the future of the stock market” or “Write my entire novel” (though those absolutely appear). Instead, they’re about nudging, reframing, and accelerating work we were already responsible for.
Finally, there’s a meta-lesson: by 2025, asking good questions of ChatGPT became a skill in its own right. Guides, cheat sheets, and “best prompts” content exploded, all trying to teach people how to move from vague asks (“Help me with marketing”) to sharper ones (“Given this ICP and product, brainstorm 10 LinkedIn post hooks that…”) Castmagic+1
How to turn this “top 10” into better prompts for yourself
If you want to take something practical away from this list, try this:
- Start from one of the 10 patterns above.
- Add your context (who you are, your role, your constraints).
- Add an outcome format (bullets, email draft, outline, checklist).
- Add a tone or audience (friendly, executive-ready, beginner-friendly).
Instead of asking, “What should I ask ChatGPT?”, you can reverse-engineer your own personal “top 10” prompts from the patterns the world has already converged on.
Summary & next step
We may never see a perfect, official leaderboard of the top 10 questions asked of ChatGPT in 2025, but we don’t really need one. The dominant patterns are clear: write this, explain that, summarize this, guide me through, help me learn, and tell me what you (AI) can actually do. Together they sketch a picture of humans using AI not to replace thinking, but to make thinking faster, clearer, and more shareable.
If you enjoyed unpacking the questions behind the questions, consider following QuestionClass’s Question-a-Day at questionclass.com—a daily nudge to sharpen how you ask, so you can sharpen how you think.
📚Bookmarked for You
Here are a few books worth bookmarking if you want to go deeper on questions, AI, and human judgment:
The Most Human Human by Brian Christian – A thoughtful exploration of what it means to be human in the age of conversational AI and Turing tests.
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman – A foundational guide to the two systems of thinking that underlie many of the questions we ask tools like ChatGPT.
A More Beautiful Question by Warren Berger – A whole book about how ambitious, well-crafted questions drive innovation, strategy, and personal growth—perfect for designing better prompts.
🧬QuestionStrings to Practice
“QuestionStrings are deliberately ordered sequences of questions in which each answer fuels the next, creating a compounding ladder of insight that drives progressively deeper understanding. What to do now: use this string to turn a vague ‘help me’ into a sharp, high-leverage ChatGPT prompt.”
Prompt-Sharpening String
For when you’re about to ask ChatGPT something fuzzy:
“What am I actually trying to accomplish with this prompt?” →
“What context does ChatGPT need (role, audience, constraints) to help me do that?” →
“What format would be most useful for me to receive (bullets, email, script, steps)?” →
“What example or input can I provide so it isn’t starting from a blank page?” →
“If I had to make this request in one precise sentence, what would it be?”
Try weaving this into your next few prompts. You’ll notice your “top 10” questions quietly evolve from generic to genuinely powerful.
In the end, the “top questions” we ask ChatGPT are a mirror. Study them, and you’re really studying how people learn, decide, and communicate in 2025—and how you can do all three a bit better.
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