Google is about to add another product to a very short list. According to TechCrunch, the company revealed during its Q2 2026 earnings call that Gemini now has over 950 million monthly active users. That puts it on track to join Search, Gmail, Drive, Android, YouTube, and Chrome as Google products with more than a billion users.
The number is striking on its own, but the growth rate makes it more so. Gemini’s user base has tripled compared to the same period last year. Back in February, Google said the app had crossed 750 million monthly active users. That’s roughly 200 million more users gained in just a few months.
For context, OpenAI’s ChatGPT hit 1 billion monthly active users in June. Google is now right behind it, and the gap is narrowing fast. This is the most direct head-to-head competition the AI assistant market has seen since it took off.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai pointed to specific features driving that growth during the earnings call. “Users love new agentic features like Daily Brief and our personalized agent, Gemini Spark, which is now available in the U.S. and internationally. We’ve been shipping helpful new features like this at an incredible pace,” he said.
The growth is not just coming from Android. Gemini has built a real foothold on iOS too. According to analytics firm Appfigures, the app was downloaded over 137 million times on Apple’s platform in the last 12 months alone. The launch of the Nano Banana image generation model helped pull in iPhone users who might otherwise have defaulted to ChatGPT.
Market share data backs up the momentum. In its latest “State of AI” report, analytics firm Sensor Tower found that ChatGPT’s share among AI assistants fell below 50% for the first time. Looking at the first half of 2026, Gemini’s share rose to 27.7%. That’s a significant shift in a market that ChatGPT dominated almost entirely just a year ago.
One concern for Google has always been whether AI assistants would cannibalize its core search business. So far, that hasn’t happened. Google reported that its search business remains strong, partly because of its AI-focused redesign. Its Q&A-style AI Mode crossed 1 billion users this quarter and is driving what the company calls “an incremental increase” in search queries. Rather than replacing search, it seems to be expanding it.
Google also said it has cut the cost of running AI Mode through hardware engineering improvements, even as it rolls out new models and features. That matters because AI infrastructure costs have been one of the biggest pressures on the industry. Keeping those costs down while scaling to nearly a billion users is a real operational achievement, and it gives Google more room to keep investing in the product.
The bigger picture here is that the AI assistant market is consolidating around two players faster than most expected. A year ago, ChatGPT looked untouchable. Now Gemini is within striking distance, and Google has the distribution, the hardware, and the cash to keep pushing.
