By Stuart Kerr, Technology Correspondent, LiveAIWire
Gemini monthly active users passed 950 million during Google’s second-quarter 2026 earnings call, up from 750 million in February and roughly triple where the assistant stood a year ago. TechCrunch’s report on the earnings call puts Gemini on course to join Search, Gmail, Drive, Android, YouTube and Chrome on Google’s short list of billion-user products, a milestone that would have sounded implausible eighteen months ago when ChatGPT looked like the runaway default choice for anyone talking to an AI.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai credited the growth to agentic features rather than the core chatbot experience, telling analysts that “users love new agentic features like Daily Brief and our personalized agent, Gemini Spark, which is now available in the U.S. and internationally.” Apart from Android’s default placement, the Gemini app has built a genuinely competitive iOS presence too, helped by the Nano Banana image generation model, with more than 137 million iOS downloads in the past twelve months according to Appfigures.
Google has not published a breakdown of how much of the jump in Gemini monthly active users comes from the app’s own features versus the passive effect of Android’s default placement across billions of devices, a distinction that matters enormously for judging how durable the growth actually is.
ChatGPT Still Leads on Raw Gemini Monthly Active Users Comparisons, but the Gap Is Closing Fast
ChatGPT still leads Gemini monthly active users in absolute terms. Reuters reporting citing Sensor Tower data found ChatGPT crossed 1 billion global monthly active app users in May 2026, roughly three years after launch, the fastest any app in history has reached that scale, beating the multi-year climbs of Google Maps, TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. That is still comfortably ahead of Gemini’s 950 million.
But the comparison that matters more than absolute size is share of a rapidly growing category, and there the picture looks worse for OpenAI. TechCrunch’s own reporting on the earnings call cites Sensor Tower’s State of AI 2026 report, covering the first half of the year, finding that ChatGPT’s market share among AI assistants fell below 50 percent for the first time, while Gemini’s share climbed to 27.7 percent. A product that started 2026 as the default AI assistant for most of the market is ending the first half of the year fighting to hold a bare majority.
Why Raw User Counts Are Increasingly Misleading Gemini Monthly Active Users Comparisons
The Next Web’s analysis of the 1 billion milestone flags an important caveat that applies equally to Gemini’s 950 million figure: both numbers come from third-party market intelligence rather than each company’s own audited disclosure, and count monthly active app users rather than total users across web and API access. The order of magnitude is well corroborated across multiple outlets citing the same Sensor Tower data, but the precise figures carry the usual uncertainty of estimated rather than reported metrics.
The same reporting found Anthropic’s Claude running a different race entirely: about 56 million global monthly active app users, a small fraction of either Gemini or ChatGPT’s base, but growing at roughly 640 percent year over year, concentrated heavily among developers and coding use cases rather than the mass consumer market Google and OpenAI are fighting over. Anthropic has leaned into that enterprise and developer strength rather than chasing consumer scale directly, a strategic difference LiveAIWire’s own comparison of ChatGPT and Claude’s coding performance found reflected in how the two companies actually design their flagship models, with Anthropic prioritising safety-relevant coding capability and detailed explanation over the raw benchmark chasing that has driven much of OpenAI’s public messaging.
The Money Behind the User Numbers
The competitive stakes behind Gemini monthly active users go well beyond app rankings. Both OpenAI and Anthropic filed confidential paperwork for a US initial public offering within a week of each other in early June 2026, with Anthropic’s filing arriving first and, briefly, following a funding round that made the company more valuable than OpenAI for the first time. LiveAIWire’s coverage of the AI IPO wave involving OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX found that investors preparing for those listings are watching exactly the kind of user and revenue data now emerging from Google’s earnings call, since a credible growth story going into a public offering depends on demonstrating durable competitive position rather than a temporary usage spike.
Google’s own quarterly disclosure adds a wrinkle rarely visible in the consumer-facing user race: the company said it has reduced the underlying cost of running AI Mode in Search through hardware engineering, even while adding new models and features, a cost discipline point aimed as much at investors as at users choosing between apps. Search’s own AI Mode crossed 1 billion users in the same quarter, a separate milestone from the Gemini app itself, and Google said the AI overhaul is driving what it called “an incremental increase” in search queries overall, addressing the standing worry that AI answers would simply replace the search clicks that generate Google’s advertising revenue.
Two Billion-User Products in One Earnings Call
Having both the Gemini app and Search’s AI Mode cross major user thresholds in the same quarter, alongside the jump in Gemini monthly active users itself, is a distinction worth sitting with, because it means Google is now running two separate large-scale consumer AI products simultaneously rather than betting everything on a single chatbot app competing directly with ChatGPT. That dual-track approach, a standalone assistant app plus an AI layer embedded in the product people were already using billions of times a day, is a structural advantage neither OpenAI nor Anthropic can currently replicate, since neither company owns a search engine or a mobile operating system to embed AI into by default.
Where the Competition Goes From Here
The AI assistant market Gemini is closing in on was, until recently, treated as a two-horse race between OpenAI and Google, with Anthropic positioned as the smaller, developer-focused alternative. LiveAIWire’s coverage of Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 launch found that a serious open-weight Chinese competitor entering the same landscape complicates that framing further, since a model freely downloadable by anyone does not show up cleanly in monthly-active-user rankings built around branded consumer apps, even as it competes for the same underlying demand.
For a market this young, share swings this large this fast are the expected pattern rather than an anomaly. ChatGPT’s first-mover advantage bought it the fastest climb to a billion users any app has ever managed, but it did not buy durable share once a well-resourced competitor with default placement across billions of Android phones and its own search engine decided to compete seriously.
Whether Gemini’s current trajectory continues, plateaus, or reverses again depends less on any single feature launch than on whether Google can keep converting its existing platform advantages, Android, Search, Chrome, into sustained AI assistant usage rather than a temporary bump tied to one earnings quarter’s good numbers. The next two quarters of Gemini monthly active users data will say more about whether this is a durable shift in the AI assistant market or a one-off spike than this single earnings call can.
About the Author
Stuart Kerr is Technology Correspondent at LiveAIWire, covering artificial intelligence, emerging technology, and their impact on business, society, and everyday life. LiveAIWire publishes original AI journalism every weekday at liveaiwire.com.