Google Thinks It Has the Best AI Tech. Now It Needs More Users.

Google hasn’t said how many people currently use Gemini, but market leader ChatGPT has about 300 million weekly users. The Gemini app was the 54th most downloaded free app on iPhones Wednesday. ChatGPT was No. 4.

Google was caught flat-footed by the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, despite being one of the pioneers of AI and spending years working on similar chatbots. The company has been scrambling to catch up ever since.

Gemini isn’t yet a serious moneymaker, but it is central to Google’s push to stay on the cutting edge of AI, a technology already starting to reshape the company’s core search and ads businesses.

Google’s newest AI technology jumped ahead of ChatGPT maker OpenAI’s technology last month on the Chatbot Arena rankings closely watched by people in Silicon Valley. OpenAI dominated the rankings for much of the past year.

Google launched the Gemini chatbot, formerly Bard, a few months after ChatGPT and has updated it with dozens of new features in an effort to gain ground. OpenAI, meanwhile, began directly targeting Google last summer when it added a web-search function to ChatGPT.

The ChatGPT mobile app has been downloaded about 465 million times on Android and iOS devices, compared with 106 million for Gemini, according to Sensor Tower data.

Most of those downloads came on Android phones. Until recently, Gemini was part of Google’s search app on Apple devices. A separate Gemini app for iOS made its debut in November. Google said it was downloaded more than 10 million times through the end of the year.

Usage of AI features built into other applications, such as Meta Platforms’ Facebook and Instagram, aren’t captured by publicly available measures.

Until recently, the Gemini chatbot team reported to the executive in charge of search and ads, but a recent reorganization moved it to the Google DeepMind division that does advanced research.

Pichai said at the time that the move would “enable fast deployment of our new models in the Gemini app.”

Growth in search advertising has slowed in recent years, and Google has increasingly looked to new business lines including subscriptions. It offers a premium version of Gemini with more features for $20 a month, similar to other chatbots.

But unlike its competitors, Google packages its Gemini subscription with perks including AI features in apps like Gmail and two terabytes of file storage.

Sifei Han, a data scientist living in Philadelphia, upgraded to the Gemini premium plan last year after being offered a two-month free trial. He said he mainly uses it for the extra storage, not the AI features. 

“I’m more familiar with ChatGPT’s style,” said Han, who also pays for ChatGPT Plus.

About 60% of Gemini’s paying users kept their subscriptions six months after first signing up, according to an Earnest Analytics analysis of debit- and credit-card data from millions of anonymous consumers. That was better than some competitors such as Character.AI and Perplexity, but lagged behind OpenAI and Anthropic, which makes the chatbot Claude.

Subscriptions to Gemini were a fraction of the $10.7 billion in revenue Google parent Alphabet GOOGL 3.11%increase; green up pointing triangle made from subscriptions, device sales and purchases in its mobile app store in the three months ended September. Google’s core advertising business brought in $65.9 billion during the same period. The company hasn’t introduced ads in Gemini.

Gemini has been a source of controversy in the past. Google apologized to users and rolled back an image-generation feature last year after the chatbot produced images of Black soldiers in Nazi garb and sometimes refused to generate depictions of white people. It restored the feature six months later.

In addition to the chatbot, Gemini is powering features that perform complex tasks for users, like preparing research reports and generating podcasts based on a set of documents.

Google sells the technology that powers Gemini to developers, uses it for the “AI overviews” that sometimes appear at the top of search results and recently began packaging it with the business versions of Gmail and Google Drive. Pichai has said all of Google’s products with more than two billion users now have features powered by Gemini.

The company has also tried to convince device manufacturers to make Gemini the default assistant on mobile phones, which it already does on its own Pixel phones. Motorola and OnePlus, which both use Google’s Android mobile software, made Gemini the default on some of their phones last year.

Write to Miles Kruppa at miles.kruppa@wsj.com