Chatgpt and gemini each cross a billion users as the race moves to monetisation

Google announced that Gemini, the company’s fourteenth-generation product, reached one billion monthly users. Sundar Pichai posted on X that it is the fastest-growing product in Google’s history. At the same time, OpenAI disclosed a week earlier that ChatGPT also passed the one-billion mark, though the announcement was buried in a routine blog post on usage patterns, and the company’s spokesperson Linda McAuliffe declined to name the exact monthly active user count.

OpenAI’s own data show a clear slowdown. In February the firm reported 900 million weekly users; five months later, in July, that figure rose to one billion weekly. The growth rate is far removed from the period when ChatGPT was described as the fastest-growing software in history. McAuliffe confirmed that the monthly billion was crossed “some time ago”, but OpenAI is refraining from publishing an updated number, a clear sign that growth no longer tells the story the company wanted to tell.

Within Google’s ecosystem the numbers are more straightforward: 750 million monthly users in February, 950 million in July during an investor call, and one billion the week before. Josh Woodward, head of Gemini, noted that more than one hundred million active users are on iOS, meaning the overwhelming majority of the base comes from Android devices where the app is pre-installed. Google’s figures refer only to the Gemini app itself, excluding all other product integrations, so the built-in distribution advantage acts as a real force multiplier.

Comparing weekly to monthly users is not clean, but the simple reading is that ChatGPT remains larger while Gemini is growing faster. Anthropic’s Claude is also expanding quickly according to external estimates, reaching tens of millions, though the company does not release official data. Meanwhile the models themselves continue to leapfrog each other in rapid cycles, and competition now includes models emerging from China.

The race to a billion users has ended. The three companies now must decide how to monetize these bases. ChatGPT has long been the de-facto brand for chatbots, and its lead still exists even as its decisive edge has faded. OpenAI’s CodeX arrived as a response to the rise of code-focused models, Google is pushing Gemini into every corner of its product suite, and the next question is not which platform is larger but which can turn volume into revenue.