AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTYou have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load.Tech FixDespite its early stumbles, Google’s Gemini has leapfrogged ChatGPT in relevance and usefulness. Soon, it will be ubiquitous.Listen · 5:49 min Credit...Sisi YuBy Brian X. ChenBrian X. Chen is The New York Times’s lead consumer technology writer and the author of Tech Fix, a column about the social implications of the tech we use.May 19, 2026Updated 3:41 p.m. ETJust two years ago, Google looked like it was in trouble. In a desperate move to play catch-up with the OpenAI chatbot that had upended the tech industry, the search giant debuted an unpolished version of its artificial intelligence on Google.com. The A.I. spat out shoddy information, including advice for people to eat rocks and put glue on their pizza.Google’s reign over the internet seemed at risk.But today, consensus is forming in Silicon Valley not only that Google has recovered and caught up but that it could actually win the A.I. race, a testament to how so much can change in so little time.Google announced on Tuesday at Google I/O, its conference for software developers, that in only one year the number of people regularly using its chatbot, Gemini, had more than doubled to 900 million, on a par with OpenAI’s self-reported number of active users for ChatGPT and nearly 30 times the estimated web traffic of Anthropic’s Claude chatbot, which is more focused on business customers.And unlike Anthropic and OpenAI, which are still losing money from operating expensive A.I. data centers, Google is rapidly developing ways to use A.I. to increase profit with online advertising, its bread and butter. In its last quarter, Google reported, its advertising revenue rose 16 percent to $77 billion, fueled by A.I. technology that has helped marketers collect deeper information about users’ interests.Pretty soon, Gemini will become a staple on a competitor’s platform: Apple’s iPhone. Google and Apple said in January that Gemini would become the foundational A.I. technology for a future version of Siri, Apple’s voice assistant. Gemini is already included on Android devices, so the partnership with Apple will, in effect, bake Gemini into virtually all of the world’s phones.At I/O this week, Google shared its vision for how it would use A.I. to increase sales for online retailers, including through a new type of shopping cart that automatically surfaces promotions to shoppers.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENT