Gemini Hits 1 Billion Monthly Users, Fastest Growth in Google’s History

Google’s Gemini app has reached 1 billion monthly active users, CEO Sundar Pichai announced on X on Tuesday, making it the fastest-growing product in the company’s history. The milestone makes Gemini the 14th Google product to achieve 1 billion users, Pichai said.

The announcement follows a rapid ramp: Google reported 750 million monthly users in February, hit 950 million by late July on its earnings call, and crossed 1 billion last week before the formal announcement, a Google spokesperson told The Verge. Daily active users on Gemini tripled over the past year, according to TechCrunch.

Gemini’s growth is largely confined to the app and web interface. The 1 billion figure does not count users who interact with Gemini through Google’s other integrations, such as Gmail, Drive, or Search’s AI Mode, TechCrunch and Ars Technica reported. Google previously said the AI Mode in Search alone has over 1 billion monthly users globally, but the Gemini app metric is separate.

The milestone positions Gemini neck-and-neck with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which surpassed 1 billion monthly active users in June, according to TechCrunch, or “some time ago,” per an OpenAI spokesperson quoted by The Verge, with a billion weekly active users hit in July. ChatGPT had 900 million weekly active users in February, suggesting a slowdown in its growth rate from earlier years. OpenAI declined to provide a monthly user count.

“The race to a billion users is over — now these companies have to race to find things for those users to do, and ways to make money in the process,” The Verge noted.

Usage patterns underscore the rapid shift toward voice-based AI interaction. Among Gemini’s active users, 63% use the voice feature to talk directly to the assistant, Google executives said. Of those using Gemini Live, 20% share their camera or screen feeds with the bot for help, according to Josh Woodward, Google’s vice president overseeing Gemini, speaking to Ars Technica. An increasing share of voice users are “voice-only,” Woodward added.

On the image front, Gemini now generates more than 150 million images daily, Google reported. Woodward told Ars Technica that businesses frequently use Google’s Imagen model for marketing materials, though many images are likely memes and jokes. All images carry Google’s SynthID watermark.

The app’s user base skews heavily toward Android. Google said Gemini has more than 100 million active users on iOS, implying the vast majority of its 1 billion users are on Android, as The Verge noted. The Gemini app comes preinstalled on many Android phones, a distribution advantage OpenAI lacks.

Other usage details emerged from the announcements. Woodward told Ars Technica that 38% of school-related requests to Gemini include a file attachment, and Google plans to release a new batch of study tools in the coming weeks.

On the model front, Google recently launched Gemini 3.5 Flash, which the company says is designed to improve coding and autonomous AI-agent tasks, TechCrunch reported.

The announcement comes just after Google’s Q2 2026 earnings call and ahead of its Made by Google hardware event, where more Gemini-powered features for Pixel devices are expected, according to TechCrunch.

While ChatGPT still holds the lead in brand recognition and overall size, the gap has narrowed significantly, The Verge reported. Both companies face the challenge of monetizing a massive but still evolving user base as competition intensifies from Anthropic’s Claude and models from China.