GoKawiilJoe Maring / Android Authority
While ChatGPT remains the de facto giant in the AI market, OpenAI has faced several issues over the last year or so amid increasingly negative press. Not only was last year’s launch of GPT-5 a bit rocky at first, but the company also came under fire earlier this year for its involvement with the US government and the DoJ. More recently, it made headlines after it came to light that a recent Florida shooter had used the tool to plan the crime as well.
Gemini’s trajectory has been quite a bit different. When Google Bard first launched, it had its strengths but was largely considered inferior to OpenAI’s approach.
In 2024, Google rebranded it as Gemini and began dramatically improving the service. By the end of the year, Gemini was pulling in around 90-140 million monthly users, which represented a large chunk of AI users, but it was dwarfed by ChatGPT’s 200-250 million monthly users.
Since then, we’ve seen massive improvements to its models, superior service integration, and other moves that have arguably made Gemini the most important competitor to ChatGPT.
In 2026, ChatGPT is an unstoppable giant with roughly 900 million weekly users, but Gemini is slowly catching up. Even though Gemini’s 750 million monthly users might sound small by comparison, most other AI platforms have far fewer users. For example, Claude has seen a meteoric rise in 2026, and yet it still only sees about 30 million monthly users.
There are many reasons why the gap is drastically closing, but below are just four of the reasons why Gemini is on the rise.
In 2026, do you prefer Gemini or ChatGPT? 226 votes ChatGPT 10 % Gemini 67 % Neither, I prefer Claude. 19 % I either avoid AI or prefer a different tool (Tell us more in comments) 4 %
Gemini comes with Drive storage
Robert Triggs / Android Authority
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