The first chatbot introduced was OpenAI’s ChatGPT and remained a market leader. Since then, Google’s Gemini is trying to catch up and now the gap between them is narrowing. The jury is still out on who finally leads.
ChatGPT defined this category by its first-mover or pioneer advantage. It witnessed one of the fastest adoptions and near-total mindshare. In fact, it is accepted as another name of AI. However, since then Google’s Gemini 3 has no longer remained a chaser but has become a genuine challenger.
Google’s Gemini is powered by Gemini 2.5 Flash including Nano Banana, the image variant and Pro. It has been integrated to Google’s ecosystem (say Search, Gmail and productivity suites). It acquires contextual relevance.
It has 346 active users monthly. Amongst the downloads in India. It holds 50 per cent market share. Googles overall figures of monthly users are 650 million. In absolute number, ChatGPT’s monthly active users are 810 million, but its growth rate is slowing down. Even in desktop visits, Gemini is ahead of ChatGPT.
Google has added features such as Nano Banana and has launched Gemini 3. It has accelerated its adoption. At the beginning of 2025, Gemini had fewer than 100 million weekly active users, as compared to over 200 million for ChatGPT. The gap has now narrowed sharply. Nano Banana has enhanced Gemini’s multi-modal capability. Gemini is preferred by enterprise and research-oriented users who put a premium on accuracy and efficiency, whereas ChatGPT has a creative flair.
There are other challengers in the market — Perplexity and Claude. Both recorded triple-digit growth in 2025. Rather than who was the first, what matters in the market is who is the best now. Besides the newer systems better understand the intent of the user and therefore require fewer prompts.
Perplexity is strengthening its citation-based research. It is a precision search tool, whereas others are ‘needle-in-the-haystack’ versions. Claude has coding depth (especially its 3.5 Sonnet and Opus variants). In enterprise automation and regulated sectors, the factors such as reliability, governance, and compliance matter more than colloquial flair.
Progress is not to be measured in terms of higher reasoning scores only. The industry has to focus on smooth workflows, better planning and natural grasp of intent. This gives rise to on-device AI. Gemini has redefined intelligence. It does not route every action through cloud. Many things are worked locally resulting in lower latency, better privacy and usefulness even when connectivity is so so.
The transitional testbed in India is that we have a variety of devices and a huge mobile-first population. There is zero-swift-cost as GPT Go is free. Gemini is bundled with Jio. Perplexity is boarded with Airtel. If instant intelligence is provided by the model as well as reliability, such a model can work anywhere in the world.
OpenAI is alive to this competition and is trying to improve personalization, reliability, image generation and overall user experience.
AI models must show stronger alignment with user intent. Just better linguistic fluency is not enough. There should be content retention, reasoning framework and task abstraction.
The matter is now for competitive advantage. There should be lock-in with ecosystem through habit formation and workflow intelligence. It is a question that has shifted from the model being the best to a model that knows the user best.
Intelligence should flow effortlessly. Systems should understand intent. They should paraphrase imperfect phrasing. They should be responsive regardless of network conditions. Gemini has entered this battleground. It throws a challenge. Can ChatGPT meet it?
Model depth is okay, but at the same time there should be excellent distribution and usability. OpenAI is working on this by introducing GPT 5.2.
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