Google’s Gemini is in a rapid growth stage and is rapidly narrowing the gap with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Gemini’s global monthly active users grew about 30% between August and November, roughly six times the growth of ChatGPT, according to Sensor Tower’s web and mobile application traffic data first reported by The Information. The surge suggests that Google has reached an inflection point after releasing its latest artificial intelligence model, Gemini 3, which outperformed GPT-5 on several key metrics.
Gemini has made inroads in both web and mobile. Sensor Tower found that Gemini’s global network traffic doubled between August and November, while ChatGPT’s increased by 1%. During this period, Gemini’s mobile downloads grew approximately twice as fast as ChatGPT.
User engagement is also on the rise: Gemini users now spend about 11 minutes a day on the app, more than double the time logged in in March. Sensor Tower estimates that twice as many U.S. Android users access Gemini through the operating system itself rather than as a standalone app, as ChatGPT lacks a built-in distribution channel (although it is integrated into Apple iOS).
However, ChatGPT remains the most widely used chatbot. Sam Altman said in October that ChatGPT had more than 800 million weekly users, a number that has since grown to nearly 900 million, according to The Information, citing sources familiar with the company’s internal data.
Google’s Gemini 3 Pro model outperforms ChatGPT 5 Pro and 5.1 “Think” models in inference, multimodal understanding, and multiple benchmarks. On Humanity’s final exam, a 2,500-question assessment covering math, science, logic and history, the Gemini 3 Pro achieved an accuracy of 37.5%, while ChatGPT achieved an accuracy of 26.5%. Third-party evaluations echo this trend: Vellum’s Agent AI rankings ranked the Gemini 3 Pro ahead of GPT-5.1 in inference and high school math, based on GPQA Diamond and AIME 2025 benchmark results.
But as Gemini rapidly expands its footprint, regulators are pressing Google to ask whether its advantage stems from technological innovation or market power. Authorities are investigating whether Google unfairly diverts traffic from publishers and limits rivals’ access to comparable data.
Yesterday (December 9), the European Commission officially launched an antitrust investigation into whether Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode misused publisher content without compensation, thus consolidating the company’s market dominance.
The investigation follows a complaint in July from the Alliance of Independent Publishers, which argued that Google’s artificial intelligence summaries stole revenue from news outlets. The EU investigation fits a wider pattern of scrutiny under the Digital Markets Act, including previous penalties related to Android and Google’s advertising practices.
