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Interest in Gemini surged after Google’s AI updates rolled out in September.
In Ukraine, the most popular Google search of the year was “power outage schedule”, while globally the top spot went to Google’s artificial intelligence system Gemini, which outperformed political figures and major sporting events. Interest spiked in the autumn, when Google’s AI made a “historic breakthrough” and became the first large language model to win gold at an international programming competition, EuroNews reports.
Google announced that in its 2025 “Year in Search” ranking, “Gemini” became the most-searched global query. The company notes that this term showed the strongest and most sustained growth in traffic compared with last year. The top three also included “India vs England” in men’s cricket and the name of far-right American activist Charlie Kirk, who was killed in September.
According to Google’s analytics, the surge in interest began in September after the company showcased its achievements and rolled out major AI updates for Chrome, Search and Android. Two months later, Google introduced Gemini 3, built on Alphabet’s custom chips. The new model quickly became a hot topic in the industry and saw strong user uptake. Gemini 3 received high praise from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Nvidia and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. Benioff wrote on X: “The leap is incredible — reasoning, speed, images, video… everything is sharper and faster. It feels like the world has changed again.”
Google integrated Gemini 3 into Search through a new “AI mode” and introduced “advanced agentic coding capabilities” together with its Google Antigravity platform. The company claims the model requires fewer prompts than its predecessors and can “bring any idea to life thanks to its state-of-the-art reasoning and multimodal abilities”.
Independent benchmarks confirmed the model’s strong performance. Gemini 3 outperformed OpenAI’s GPT-5 Pro in Humanity’s Last Exam, which assesses general reasoning skills. It also achieved top scores in multimodal benchmarks, including SimpleQA Verified, which measures factual accuracy in short answers and the breadth of parametric knowledge. The release of Gemini 3 increased pressure on OpenAI, which is currently facing criticism over the “less friendly tone” of GPT-5 and lawsuits from families who link the use of ChatGPT to the suicides of relatives. According to media reports, Sam Altman told employees in a 1 December memo that the company had declared a “red code” to improve ChatGPT’s quality and delay new product launches.
However, Bloomberg reported that ChatGPT continues to hold a decisive lead in the AI market, significantly outperforming Google Gemini in user numbers despite its competitor’s technical successes in industry tests. Analysts attribute this to OpenAI’s aggressive scaling strategy, while Google remains more focused on scientific research.
