Google says Gemini has reached 1B users faster than any

What happened

Google has been all-in with Gemini for the last several years, and despite some animosity online, the bet is paying off. CEO Sundar Pichai announced today that Gemini has reached 1 billion monthly active users (MAUs), an important milestone for any Google product. While 13 other Google products have managed that feat, Gemini has done it faster than any other.

Getting a billion people to do anything is a major accomplishment, but Google does have some notable advantages. Virtually every Android phone in the world right now ships with the Gemini app and multiple features that guide people toward using the AI. It’s not all due to Google’s software, though.

Woodward says that more than 100 million of Gemini’s MAUs are on iOS, where they would have to manually download the Gemini app in addition to (or instead of) something like ChatGPT or Claude. So Gemini has clearly seen huge success over the past two years, at least as far as user numbers go.

Google doesn’t break out AI in its earnings reports, but we know the company’s spending on AI infrastructure has pushed its cash flow into negative territory for the first time ever. It’s throwing a lot of money at AI to get those numbers up, and who knows if they’ll stay there.

This internal shakeup may have contributed to slowing progress with Gemini. 5 Pro, its latest frontier model, in June. However, that window came and went with no word. 5 Pro and had already started training Gemini 4. Reports have indicated that Google is unhappy with Gemini Pro’s coding performance, which lags OpenAI and Anthropic models. 5 Pro.

Why it matters

Gemini has wormed its way into virtually every Google product and service, powering email organization in Gmail, document summary in Drive, and much more. Gemini is also core to Google’s flagship search experience, with AI Mode and AI Overviews becoming increasingly hard to avoid. The 1 billion-user metric has nothing to do with any of that, though.

These 1 billion users may also be encountering Gemini in all those places, but that’s not the MAU metric. Pichai is talking only about people who are opening the Gemini app or visiting the Gemini web interface to enter a prompt or access Gemini Live. If you used Gemini only once in the past month, you are part of this cohort.

Josh Woodward, Google’s VP overseeing Gemini, has expanded on Pichai’s announcement with additional tidbits about how people use the chatbot. Apparently, an impressive 63 percent of Gemini’s active users are using voice input, and an increasing number of them are “voice-only” users. Of the people who use Gemini Live, 20 percent are sharing their camera feeds and screens with the robot to get help.

It’s no secret that students use AI models to do their work (sometimes too much). Woodward says that 38 percent of school-related requests include an attachment, so Google is working on a new batch of study tools to be released in the coming weeks to better support that. On the image-generation front, Google is burning tokens like never before.

Those billion users are turning to Google’s AI to make a staggering 150 million images every day. Woodward alleges that businesses love these Nano Banana images to make marketing materials, but plenty of them are probably memes and jokes being spread around the Internet. They’re all watermarked with SynthID, but that might not help us know what’s true in the future.

What to watch

Google’s progress in AI models was impressive throughout 2025, but there’s a sense that its efforts may be hitting a wall. The company has lost several key scientists and researchers in recent months, and DeepMind cofounder Demis Hassabis has stepped down from his leadership role. While he’s still at Google, reports suggest he’s not very interested in the hyperscaling route that Google is taking with AI.

Gemini is still capable enough for most users, but the cracks are beginning to show. Even Google’s dominant market presence may not be enough to prop up Gemini’s numbers if it underperforms the competition for long enough.