Alphabet reported its third-quarter results on 28 October 2026, and the line people will remember came from chief executive Sundar Pichai. He said the Gemini app "has reached one billion users", making it the fastest-growing product in Google's history. Alphabet didn't say whether that counts monthly users or something else, so treat it as Google's own headline figure rather than a like-for-like comparison with other apps.
The numbers that matter
Alphabet's revenue was $127.6 billion for the quarter, up 25% on a year earlier, and Pichai said the company is now on a half-trillion-dollar annual run rate. Google Cloud, which sells computing power and AI services to other businesses, grew 103% to $30.7 billion, and its operating income rose from $3.6 billion to $11.1 billion. Pichai credited "huge demand" for Google's AI infrastructure and its own TPU chips.
Usage grew faster still. Google's own model APIs now process nearly 32 billion tokens a minute, which Pichai said is more than four times the volume of a year ago. A token is a small chunk of text, roughly three quarters of a word, so that is an enormous amount of reading and writing done by software every minute. Pichai also said Search query growth is at its highest in five years, which suggests AI answers haven't eaten into Google Search so far.
The cost of keeping up
Alphabet spent $51.4 billion on property and equipment in the quarter, mostly data centres and chips, compared with $24.0 billion a year earlier. That pushed free cash flow to minus $9.1 billion, meaning the company spent more cash than its operations brought in. It issued $28.7 billion of bonds in the quarter and made no share buybacks. Net income fell to $26.5 billion from $35.0 billion, partly because of an $8.7 billion loss on equity investments.
The same day, Google DeepMind introduced Gemini 4 Carbon, which it calls its strongest model, with a focus on cybersecurity and long tasks. It is going first to a small group of cyber defenders, with wider access promised later.
What this means if you run a brand or a team
A billion people using Gemini almost certainly includes your customers, the candidates you want to hire and the people who approve your budget. Many marketing teams check how their company appears in ChatGPT and stop there. With these numbers, Gemini deserves the same attention, especially because it sits inside Search, Android and Workspace, where people meet it without choosing it.
There is a simple test you can run this week. Ask Gemini the three questions a new customer would ask about your company, such as what you do, how you compare with a named competitor and what you cost. Write down anything it gets wrong or leaves out, then check whether the correct answer is easy to find on your website. Run the same questions in ChatGPT and Claude so you can see where the answers differ.
The Compare page shows how Gemini stacks up against other assistants, and our explainer on Google's Gemini agent for work covers what Google is building for companies.