Google says Gemini has surpassed 950 million monthly users, putting its AI assistant within reach of the billion-user mark. The figure was disclosed during Alphabet’s second-quarter 2026 earnings call and remains a company-reported metric rather than an independently verified count.
The reported audience is three times larger than it was a year earlier, Google said. The company previously placed the Gemini app at 750 million monthly active users in February, suggesting that adoption continued to rise rapidly during the following months. If Google’s numbers are accurate, Gemini could soon join the company’s collection of services with billion-scale audiences.
Gemini narrows the distance with ChatGPT
Google’s figures would put Gemini closer to ChatGPT, which OpenAI said reached 1 billion monthly active users in June. The competing totals have not been independently verified, but they show how both companies are presenting consumer reach as a central measure in the contest for AI-assistant users.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai credited some of Gemini’s momentum to a steady rollout of agent-style features. He highlighted Daily Brief and the personalized Gemini Spark agent, which he said had expanded in the United States and other markets. Those additions reflect Google’s effort to make Gemini useful for recurring tasks rather than limiting it to individual questions.
The app also appears to be building an audience beyond Android. Appfigures estimates that Gemini recorded more than 137 million iOS downloads over the preceding 12 months. Google has supported that push with features including image generation through its Nano Banana model, although download totals do not necessarily represent monthly active users.
Sensor Tower’s State of AI report offered another view of the market. Its estimates for the first half of 2026 placed Gemini’s share of the AI-assistant category at 27.7%, while ChatGPT’s share reportedly fell below 50% for the first time. Those figures are third-party estimates rather than independently confirmed user totals, but they point to a market that may be becoming less concentrated.
Google is expanding AI without abandoning Search
Many people already use AI assistants as an alternative to traditional web searches, creating a potentially awkward overlap for Google. The company nevertheless said its Search business remained strong as it added more AI-driven experiences. Google also claimed that its question-and-answer-style AI Mode had crossed 1 billion users during the quarter, though that figure has not been independently verified.
Google said AI Mode was producing an incremental increase in search queries rather than merely shifting existing activity into a different interface. The company also claimed that hardware engineering had reduced the cost of operating the feature even as it introduced additional models and capabilities. Together, those statements frame Gemini and AI-powered Search as complementary parts of Google’s strategy, even as the boundaries between an assistant and a search engine continue to narrow.