What is ChatGPT and how does it work in 2 minutes?

ChatGPT is a chat interface launched by OpenAI on 30 November 2022. Behind it sits a Large Language Model (GPT-4, GPT-4o, GPT-5 depending on the version) that predicts text word by word. You type a question, it answers in seconds. As of 2025-2026, more than 800 million people use it every week.

What is ChatGPT and how does it work in 2 minutes, concretely?

Here's the simplest way to picture it. Open chatgpt.com, type « summarise the specialty coffee market in Belgium ». ChatGPT breaks your sentence into « tokens » (chunks of words), feeds them into the GPT model, which computes the most probable next word, and another, and another. Within seconds a synthesised paragraph appears.

Three facts every executive should know. ChatGPT reached 100 million users in two months, the fastest consumer app adoption ever recorded, beating TikTok and Instagram (UBS / Reuters, February 2023). By September 2025 OpenAI claimed 800 million weekly active users (Reuters, OpenAI communications). And ChatGPT now has « browsing »: it can fetch real-time information online and cite sources, something it could not do at launch.

Two practical consequences for a small business. One: your customers already use ChatGPT to pre-qualify suppliers (« recommend me a sommelier in Brussels »). Two: if your brand is missing from the sources ChatGPT reads (third-party sites, press, Wikipedia, Wikidata), you are invisible. "The good news is that being absent from the sources ChatGPT reads is an editorial-engineering problem, not a matter of luck," says Lorenzo Eeman, founder of PROEMA.

What the 2026 numbers say on What is ChatGPT and how does it work in 2 minutes

Public benchmarks converge on three signals. ChatGPT hit 900 million weekly active users in early 2026 (OpenAI announcement reported by TechCrunch on February 27, 2026). Google AI Overviews reached 47 % of European queries in March 2026 (Semrush Sensor 2026). Perplexity reported +800 % year-over-year query growth. In practical terms: informational traffic leaving Google's blue links for answer engines is no longer marginal, for a B2C F&B site, it typically runs 15-25 % of measurable traffic via Cloudflare AI Crawl Control or GA4 « ai-referrer » segments.

Why What is ChatGPT and how does it work in 2 minutes isn't optional for serious brands

The 5W Citation Source Audit Q1 2026 shows LLMs concentrate citations on a tiny set of sources: Wikipedia (13.15 % at ChatGPT) + Reddit (11.97 %) = 25 % of citations, followed by vertical databases (Yelp, TripAdvisor, IMDB depending on context). For F&B brands, the problem is binary: either you're in the sources LLMs read, or you never show up, there is no « page 2 » of LLM citation. PROEMA's documented discipline targets exactly this presence: structure content via Schema.org, publish on hubs crawlers actually read, and lock down Author/Person + sameAs Wikidata to clear the confidence filter.

PROEMA operational rule for What is ChatGPT and how does it work in 2 minutes

Translation: stop watching from the bench. By June 2026, a B2C F&B brand with no Schema.org Author/Person, no sameAs Wikidata, and no FAQPage gets approximately zero LLM citations on long-tail informational queries, confirmed across PROEMA verticals (expertvin.be, expertcafe.be, zeroproof.one). The fix isn't theoretical: it's three concrete deliverables (Schema markup audit + Wikidata entry + FAQ playbook 5-blocs structure) executed in six to eight weeks.