Google has launching AI products at breakneck pace over the last couple of months, and it seems to be finally seeing some results.
Google’s Gemini has appeared to catch up with ChatGPT in Google Trends, which compares the search interest between the two terms on Google. While Gemini has consistently trailed ChatGPT by a large margin for the last couple of years, over the last week, the worldwide searches for Gemini were ahead of the worldwide searches for ChatGPT on 6th September, before slightly falling off again.
This increased interest in Gemini coincides with integration of Google’s Nano Banana image search model on Gemini. Google hadn’t only created a powerful model with Nano Banana, which seems to be state-of-the-art for image editing, but has also been aggressively marketing it. Google has released Nano Banana on AI studio, its Gemini app, and even as a bot on X. All this buzz seems to have drawn people to Gemini, which is possibly the easiest way for most people to use the model.
Google’s data has also suggested that Google was seeing a surge of usage on Gemini after the release of the model. A Google executive said that Nano Banana had brought 10 million new users to Gemini, and it’s already edited 200 million images. SimilarWeb data had also seen a spike of usage for Google AI Studio after Nano Banana was released.
And it’s not just Nano Banana, but a bunch of other releases that have enabled Gemini to challenge ChatGPT for the top spot. Google had also released the Veo3 model, which was state-of-the-art for video creation, and remains far better than all competition in the video generation spacec. In addition, Google had earlier released the Gemini 2.5 Pro and Flash models, which were the first Google models that held their own against OpenAI. And Nano Banana seems to have been the icing on the cake, and seems to have finally gotten people interested in Gemini. It remains to be seen if Gemini can sustain this momentum, but it seems to have a foot in the door for challenging OpenAI as the AI chatbot of choice for most of the world.