Search is splitting into two economies
search is splitting into two economies: chatgpt crossed a billion monthly users and handles 2 billion queries a day, while gemini tripled its referral share in a year, yet google still runs over 90% of all search volume. the ai search market jumped from $12 billion to nearly $30 billion in two years.
the link is no longer the unit of value, the answer is.
Context
Reuters (Jun 2, 2026) reports ChatGPT crossed 1 billion global monthly active app users, the fastest app ever to reach the milestone, citing a market intelligence firm. The Verge (Aug 11, 2026) says ChatGPT and Gemini have both passed 1 billion users.
BrightEdge data (May 22, 2026) says Gemini's AI referral share nearly tripled from 4.3 percent to 11.6 percent in Q1 and reached 13.2 percent in April, while ChatGPT fell from 89.2 percent to 81.4 percent.
The billion users and the Gemini referral share tripling match Reuters, The Verge and BrightEdge. The 2 billion queries a day figure was not seen; TechCrunch (Jul 21, 2025) reports 2.5 billion prompts a day, a different measure. Google running over 90 percent of search volume and the market going from $12 billion to nearly $30 billion were not seen in the sources read, so unsupported here, not refuted. A $12.4 billion 2025 market size appears in Seekon's report (Jan 2, 2026), other reports give different sizes.
Related work
Watch next
- Find a source for Google's share of total search volume.
Sources
- Reuters, Jun 2, 2026reuters.com
- The Verge, Aug 11, 2026theverge.com
- TechCrunch, Jul 21, 2025techcrunch.com
Provenance
The note above is reproduced unedited from the original post, first published on Threads on 2 October 2026 at 02:49 IST. Sources are the papers and datasets the note draws on.
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