Google ‘Gemini’ Searches Jump During ChatGPT Outage, Highlighting Competition

Amid an hourslong outage Tuesday affecting Microsoft-backed (MSFT) OpenAI’s ChatGPT, searches for “Gemini,” Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, jumped, suggesting that Google’s efforts to present itself as an alternative to the AI pioneer may be gaining ground.

ChatGPT Outage Affected All Users Tuesday

OpenAI reported an outage that affected all ChatGPT users for several hours on Tuesday. “We experienced a major outage impacting all users on all plans of ChatGPT,” OpenAI said in an incident report.

The outages started in the early morning hours of Tuesday and were resolved by around 1 p.m. ET the same day, OpenAI said. The company didn’t specify a cause for the outage. The ChatGPT outage comes shortly after OpenAI announced its latest AI model, GPT-4o.

Searches for ‘Gemini’ Surge During Outage

During the ChatGPT outage Tuesday, Google searches for “Gemini,” Google’s AI chatbot, surged to 327,058 searches, a nearly 60% jump from the 204,991 average daily search volume between May 4 and June 3, according to analysis from software company QRFY. It said that searches for “Microsoft Copilot” also jumped, although less significantly than those for Gemini.

QRFY CEO Marc Porcar said, “Google has been making incredible efforts to position itself as OpenAI’s main competitor for conversational AI and we are witnessing clear signals of that happening today.”

He noted “the fact that there is a clear parallel trend between ChatGPT’s outage and Gemini’s search surge suggests that people perceive Gemini as an obvious alternative to ChatGPT,” adding that “in ChatGPT’s absence, it seems clear that people turn to Gemini.”

Shares of Microsoft closed 0.6% higher at $416.07 Tuesday, while shares of Google parent Alphabet (GOOGL) ticked up 0.4% to $173.79.