From ChatGPT to Google Gemini: How the New AI Search Race Changes Brand Visibility (and Your GEO Strategy)
- Sabrina Bulteau
- Dec 10, 2025
- 5 min read
Updated: Nov 11/12/25
By Sabrina Bulteau PingPrime.ai
For two years, the story was simple: ChatGPT defined the market; everyone else chased. That story is changing fast.
Three signals from the past few weeks make it clear that we have entered a new phase in the AI race:
Google is fusing AI Overviews and Gemini’s AI Mode directly inside Search, turning the world’s largest search engine into a continuous AI conversation.
ChatGPT’s growth is slowing, while Google’s Gemini is accelerating, both in users and engagement.
Sam Altman has issued an internal “red alert” at OpenAI, calling for an urgent refocus on ChatGPT as competition intensifies.
For brands, publishers, and platforms, this is not just tech gossip. It is a distribution story: where attention flows, who owns the interface, and how your content or products show up inside increasingly AI-driven environments.
1. Google turns Search into a native AI assistant
Until now, Google Search had two parallel layers:
AI Overviews: AI-generated summaries at the top of search results.
AI Mode (Gemini): a separate conversational space, a “ChatGPT-like” interface users had to open deliberately.
This split created friction: users had to decide upfront whether they wanted a quick answer (classic search / AI Overview) or a deeper exploration (AI Mode).
Google is now testing a fusion of both:
Users start with an AI Overview as usual.
From that same screen, they can continue the conversation with Gemini—ask follow-ups, refine the query, explore context—without leaving the results page.
A few numbers show why this matters:
Around 2 billion users see AI Overviews every month.
Gemini has surpassed 650 million monthly active users, nearly doubling in seven months.
By merging these experiences, Google is quietly onboarding hundreds of millions of people into conversational AI, even if they never tap a dedicated “AI” button.
In practice, it means:
For a huge share of the planet, “Google it” is becoming “talk to Gemini” by default.
2. The numbers: ChatGPT is still bigger, but momentum is shifting
Fresh usage data (via Sensor Tower, relayed by BNT) shows a notable change in trend between August and November 2025:
ChatGPT
+6% growth in users over the period
~810 million monthly active users
~55% share of the consumer AI assistant market
–3 points of market share
Gemini
+30% growth over the same period
+3 points of market share
~190% year-on-year growth
Engagement tells an even sharper story:
Gemini’s average daily time in app is up 120%, to around 11 minutes per day.
ChatGPT’s time in app is up just 6%, with a 10% drop in usage observed between July and November.
In other words:
ChatGPT still has more users, but they are not accelerating.
Gemini has fewer users, but they are adopting it faster and using it more intensely.
Add to this the rise of Perplexity, which shows +215% year-on-year growth, and you no longer have a single default assistant – you have a competitive ecosystem.
3. Inside OpenAI’s “red alert”: refocus on ChatGPT
Against this backdrop, Sam Altman has sent an internal memo described as an “alerte rouge” (red alert), urging OpenAI to urgently refocus on its core product: ChatGPT.
Key points from that internal communication and surrounding reporting:
OpenAI spent much of 2025 diversifying:
Sora (video generation)
Infrastructure projects
A connected device initiative
Altman now calls for improvements to ChatGPT on:
Personalisation
Speed
Ability to answer user requests more effectively
Meanwhile, Google has nearly caught up in assistants, thanks to Gemini’s growth and deep integration into Search and Android.
Financially, Google generates billions in cash every quarter, while OpenAI still loses money every month and does not expect to be profitable before 2029. OpenAI is also pushing new product features in response to this pressure:
Shopping research inside ChatGPT, positioned as a way to guide users through product choices without visiting dozens of sites.
Experiments around recruitment, group conversations, and more verticalized use cases.
The message is clear: the company that made AI assistants mainstream is now fighting to keep its leadership as platforms with deeper distribution (Google, possibly Apple via Gemini partnerships) move fast.
4. What this means for brands and publishers
Beyond the headlines, these shifts reshape the environment in which your content, offers, and messaging live.
1) Search is becoming a dialogue, not a list
With AI Overviews fused into Gemini’s conversational mode, a user can:
Ask a broad question
Get a synthesized answer
Immediately refine it with follow-ups
Stay within the same, persistent context
Traditional concepts like “position 1 on page 1” matter less when:
The first thing users see is an AI summary, not your blue link.
Their second and third questions are asked inside the chat, not in separate searches.
Your strategic question shifts from:
“How do I rank for this keyword?” to “How do I become a trusted source the AI can rely on and cite consistently?”
2) Distribution is no longer single-channel
Not long ago, most “AI traffic” conversations were: What does ChatGPT say about us?
That is no longer enough:
For brands, that means:
You cannot optimize only for one AI assistant.
You need visibility, consistency, and trust signals across multiple AI surfaces.
3) Regulatory and trust pressure will grow
As AI Overviews expand, regulators are already investigating how Google uses publisher content to train models and generate answers, and whether it compensates content creators fairly.
Whatever the outcomes, the direction is clear:
Expect ongoing debates about attribution, traffic, and revenue sharing.
Expect users to care even more about source credibility, bias, and sustainability in a world where AI intermediates most information.
The AI assistant war is no longer about who has the flashiest demo. It is about who controls everyday interactions — the search box, the browser, the home screen — and whose answers users see, trust, and act on.
For organisations that move now, this new landscape is not a threat but a lever: a way to reach people with more relevance, more clarity, and more consistency across every AI-mediated touchpoint.
About Sabrina Bulteau
After more than two decades shaping the digital world - including co-founding Be Connect, one of Belgium’s first social media agencies - Sabrina Bulteau, now co-founder of PingPrime.ai, is diving headfirst into the AI Search Shift, the third wave after mobile and social. She arms brands and leaders with the mindset and strategy to win in a world where visibility is power. No jargon. Just impact.
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