In the latest earnings call for the second quarter of 2026, Google announced that the number of monthly active users of its AI assistant Gemini has exceeded the 950 million mark, marking that the product is about to join Google's "billion user club" consisting of Search, Gmail, Drive, Android, YouTube and Chrome.
Data shows that Gemini’s user base has tripled compared with the same period last year. The application previously announced in February this year that its monthly active users exceeded 750 million. With the current strong growth, Gemini is accelerating to shorten the gap with competing products OpenAI ChatGPT - which took the lead in breaking through the 1 billion monthly active mark in June this year. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet, said at the financial report that users have responded enthusiastically to new agent-level functions such as "Daily Brief" and personalized intelligence "Gemini Spark", and the company is continuing to launch practical functions with extremely high efficiency.
In addition to its solid position on Android, Gemini has also established a strong user base on the iOS platform with innovative features such as the Nano Banana image generation model. According to Appfigures, Gemini has been downloaded more than 137 million times on iOS in the past 12 months. At the same time, the "State of AI" report for the first half of 2026 released by data analysis agency Sensor Tower shows that ChatGPT's share of the AI assistant market fell below 50% for the first time, while Gemini's market share rose to 27.7%.
Although many users have begun to use AI assistants as a replacement for search tools, Google's own search business remains strong. This quarter, the number of users of Google’s question-and-answer “AI mode” has exceeded 1 billion, effectively driving incremental growth in search query volume. Google also pointed out that through optimization of hardware engineering, the company has successfully reduced the operating costs of the AI model even as it continues to introduce new models and features.