Gemini Closes In on ChatGPT as Google Reports 950 Million Monthly Users

Sundar Pichai delivered the number himself: Gemini now counts more than 950 million monthly active users, up from 750 million just five months earlier in February 2026. The disclosure, made during Alphabet's Q2 2026 earnings call, marks one of the fastest user growth trajectories Google has ever reported for a consumer AI product, and it puts Gemini within striking distance of ChatGPT's billion-user mark.

That milestone belongs to OpenAI for now. ChatGPT crossed 1 billion monthly active users in June 2026, according to the same earnings commentary and subsequent reporting from TechCrunch and The AI Insider. Google has its own billion-user product too, though it sits inside Search rather than the standalone Gemini app: the company's AI Mode, its conversational Q&A search experience, has also surpassed 1 billion users and is nudging overall search query volume higher rather than cannibalizing it.

Gemini's growth has not come from a single channel. Appfigures data cited in the coverage shows the Gemini app was downloaded more than 137 million times on iOS over the trailing 12 months, helped along by the integration of Google's Nano Banana image generation model directly into the app. Pichai also pointed to newer agentic features, Daily Brief and a personalized assistant called Gemini Spark, both now live in the U.S. and international markets, as contributors to the tripling of Gemini's user base over the past year.

A Shifting Market Split

The user counts tell one part of the story; market share tells another, and here the two outlets' reporting lines up cleanly rather than conflicting. Sensor Tower's H1 2026 report shows ChatGPT's share of the AI assistant market slipping below 50% for the first time, while Gemini's share climbed to 27.7%. Read together, these aren't contradictory data points but complementary ones: even as ChatGPT retains the largest single share and continues growing in absolute users, Gemini is eating into the percentage of the overall pie, a sign that new users entering the AI assistant category are increasingly choosing Google's product over OpenAI's.

Pichai also used the call to address a cost concern that has dogged Google's AI ambitions. Serving hundreds of millions of AI Mode and Gemini queries is computationally expensive, but he said hardware engineering improvements have lowered the per-query cost of running AI Mode even as Google keeps shipping new models and features. That efficiency claim matters strategically: it suggests Google can keep scaling Gemini and AI Mode without the unit economics deteriorating, a question that looms over every AI company racing to add users at this pace.

Taken together, the figures describe a two-horse race that's tightening. OpenAI still owns the headline billion-user milestone for a standalone assistant, but Google now has two products, Gemini and AI Mode, either at or closing in on that same threshold, backed by distribution advantages across Android, iOS, and Search that OpenAI cannot easily replicate.