Google’s Gemini nears billion-user milestone
TechCrunch Ivan Mehta ● Covered by 19 sources
Gemini just hit 950 million monthly users, tripling from last year. It's closing in on ChatGPT's billion-user mark and eating into its market share.
Based on reporting by TechCrunch, Ivan Mehta — read the original for the full story.
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Google keeps racking up products with a billion users, and Gemini is next in line to join that club. During the company's Q2 2026 earnings call, Google revealed that its AI assistant now counts more than 950 million monthly users, up threefold from a year earlier. That's a steep climb from the 750 million monthly active users Google disclosed back in February, and it puts Gemini within striking distance of ChatGPT, which crossed the billion-user threshold in June.
Sundar Pichai credited some of that growth to features people are actually using, not just installing. He pointed to Daily Brief and Gemini Spark, a personalized agent now live in the U.S. and abroad, as examples of the kind of agentic tools users have responded to. Pichai framed it as a pace problem solved: Google, in his telling, has been shipping useful updates fast enough to keep users engaged rather than just curious.
The growth isn't confined to Android, where you'd expect Google to have home-field advantage. On iOS, Gemini has built real momentum too, helped along by launches like the Nano Banana image generation model. Appfigures data shows the app has been downloaded over 137 million times on iPhones in the past year alone. And the competitive picture backs up the qualitative story: Sensor Tower's latest State of AI report found ChatGPT's share of the AI assistant market dropped below 50% for the first time, while Gemini's share climbed to 27.7% in the first half of 2026.
There's a search angle here too, and it matters because AI assistants increasingly function as search substitutes for a lot of people. Google says its search business is holding up fine despite that shift, partly because of its own AI-centric redesign. The Q&A-style AI mode surpassed a billion users this quarter, and Google describes it as driving an incremental bump in search queries rather than cannibalizing them. The company also says hardware engineering work has lowered the cost of running AI mode, even as it keeps adding new models and features on top of it.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Tripling your user base in a year while a well-funded market leader watches its share slip below 50% is not a coincidence, it's a shift in momentum. Google had every advantage here, distribution baked into Android and Search, and it's finally converting that into actual usage rather than just installs. The interesting fight now isn't Gemini catching ChatGPT in raw numbers, it's whether Google can keep search revenue intact while AI assistants quietly become the new front door to the internet.
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