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, via Visual Capitalist's Dorothy Neufeld, shows the most popular ChatGPT prompt categories, based on data from Sensor Tower.

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.

To learn more about this topic from a user perspective, check out this graphic on the most popular AI tools in 2025.