OpenAI Outage Boosts Google Gemini Searches

The trend may lend evidence that Gemini is a strong competitor

OpenAI experienced a major outage Tuesday that affected "all users on all plans of ChatGPT" and all ChatGPT-related services, the company said in a post on its site.

While the outage lasted only a few hours, one report said the downtime was enough to create a significant search boost advantage for Google's Gemini AI assistant.

Global searches for "Google, Gemini," increased by 60 percent, according to data from QR Code Generator. There were over 300,000 searches for Gemini four hours after the first reports of ChatGPT's outage, QR Code Generator said.

Using data from Google Trends, QR Code Generator noted some other findings:

- Searches for "Gemini" almost paralleled the number of searches for "ChatGPT down."

- People usually search for "Gemini" about 204,991 times per day. That number jumped to 327,058 four hours after ChatGPT went down.

- Searches also surged for "Microsoft Copilot" and "ChatGPT alternatives" during OpenAI's outage.

"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. 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. In ChatGPT's absence, it seems clear that people turn to Gemini," said Marc Porcar, CEO of QR Code Generator PRO S.L.

While OpenAI has yet to post anything about the cause of the outage, it did offer instructions to users who may still have issues accessing ChatGPT, which perform a "hard refresh":

Mac:

Chrome and/or Firefox: Press Cmd + Shift + R

Safari: Press Cmd + Option + R

PC:

Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge: Press Ctrl + F5

Mobile devices:

To hard refresh in a browser on a mobile device, users will need to manually clear the cache in browser settings before reloading the page.