Gemini hits 950M users as ChatGPT's market share dips below 50%

Google’s Gemini is on the verge of becoming the company’s next billion-user product, a milestone that would put it in the same league as Search, YouTube, and Android. During Alphabet’s Q2 2026 earnings call, CEO Sundar Pichai revealed the AI assistant now has over 950 million monthly users — triple the number it had a year ago. That trajectory has the tech giant breathing down the neck of OpenAI, whose ChatGPT crossed the 1 billion user mark just a month earlier.

What’s driving the surge isn’t just Android’s massive install base. Gemini found a surprisingly strong foothold on iOS, where Appfigures reports the app has been downloaded over 137 million times in the last 12 months, boosted partly by splashy launches like the Nano Banana image generation model. Pichai pointed to newer agentic features as the real hook. “Users love new agentic features like Daily Brief and our personalized agent, Gemini Spark,” he said, noting the latter is now available both in the U.S. and internationally.

The ground is shifting. Sensor Tower’s latest State of AI report, covering the first half of 2026, marked a symbolic threshold: ChatGPT’s market share among AI assistants fell below 50% for the first time. Gemini clawed its way to a 27.7% share. It’s no longer a one-horse race. That fragmentation is exactly what antitrust regulators have hoped for, but it’s happening through pure product velocity, not mandates.

Meanwhile, the rising tide of AI assistants hasn’t cannibalized Google’s search business the way some feared. The company disclosed that its Q&A-style AI mode in Search also crossed 1 billion users and is driving “an incremental increase” in search queries. Perhaps most telling for the bottom line, Google says hardware engineering work has actually brought down the cost of running that AI mode, even as it layers in new models. That’s the kind of detail that makes CFOs sleep better at night.