Google announced during its Q2 2026 earnings call that its AI assistant Gemini now has 950 million monthly active users, tripling from the previous year. The milestone puts Gemini within striking distance of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which reached 1 billion monthly active users in June. The growth has been driven by new agentic features such as Daily Brief and the personalized Gemini Spark agent, as well as strong iOS adoption—the Gemini app has been downloaded over 137 million times on iOS in the past 12 months, according to Appfigures.

Analytics firm Sensor Tower’s ‘State of AI’ report for H1 2026 found that ChatGPT’s market share among AI assistants fell below 50% for the first time, while Gemini‘s share rose to 27.7%. This shift reflects the increasing competition in the AI assistant space, where many users are substituting traditional search with conversational AI. Google‘s own search business has not suffered, however: its AI-powered Q&A mode crossed 1 billion users in the quarter, and the company stated that it is driving an incremental increase in search queries. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai credited the company’s rapid feature shipping pace for Gemini‘s growth.

From an infrastructure perspective, Google noted that through hardware engineering it has reduced the cost of running AI mode, even as it introduces new models and features. This cost efficiency is critical for sustaining the scale of serving nearly a billion users. The article does not provide technical details about the underlying models or hardware, but the numbers indicate that Google is successfully competing in the consumer AI assistant market, leveraging its existing ecosystem and distribution advantages.