Eric Siu and Neil Patel discuss how Google's Gemini Nano Banana launch drove user growth against ChatGPT and Grok. They cover adoption rates among students, pricing strategies, and what the shift means for go-to-market tactics in AI.
Chapters
Which product do you think actually saved Gemini, aka Google?
What book saved Gemini?
Yeah, what product?
Product? I don't know what you mean.
I'll just— I'll show you where I'm going with this. So when you look at the launch of Nano Banana, that's when Gemini's monthly active users grew from 350 million to 650 million by October. So this one guy, so this is Josh Woodward, he's the head of Google Labs, and he said, Basically, once they launched Nano Banana, their TPUs almost melted. It was getting so much usage. And I think really, it's not even just Nano Banana, everything that we're launching, NotebookLM, all the upgrades, they were hitting it hard on social too. They built all these separate X accounts and they were firing on all cylinders. And so when you look at it, Google said in October that the Gemini app's monthly active users swelled to 650 million from 350 million. And you look at all the benchmarks, all these things, they're just They are number one right now in my mind, which is what you predicted a few years ago.
So they have too much data. They have a great engineering team. I don't think that Google's going to crush ChatGPT where they don't exist. I think they're all going to coexist, but I do think Google will be the leader.
Yeah. AI Overviews, by the way, which uses generative AI to summarize answers to queries, has 2 billion monthly users. I don't like how they call those users. It's just, you know what I mean? But OpenAI said in October that ChatGPT hit 800 million users per week. So food for thought. I think there's going to be different players in this. And I was listening to some AI people talk about this recently, but they feel like LLMs are— one of the guys was like, LLMs, just like, they're just like gas stations. They're very commoditized. You're going to use this gas station, use this gas station, like whatever.
Did I ever tell you the story on when I was at Heathen's house and it really made me realize how Gemini was going to win?
No.
I was talking to my niece.
You're talking to your niece about this? Go ahead.
Okay, so I'm sitting watching TV. We're watching Home Alone. This was like, You know, call it a month or so. It was actually in December, early December. Okay. Sitting watching Home Alone at night. My niece Aria is sitting next to me and she's doing her homework and she's using AI and she's like, everyone does it. The teachers even know that we use AI. I was like, okay. So then I'm like, she's using Google and she's using AI mode. All right. You can call it whatever you want. I could just call it all Gemini cuz it's all pulling from the Same source code from my understanding, right? And I was like, why don't you use ChatGPT? She's like, no one in school uses ChatGPT. I'm like, what are you talking about? She's like, you know, if you keep using it and you ask all these complicated questions, it cuts you off after a while. You gotta pay money. And I was just like, seriously, it cuts you off? Now keep in mind, I don't realize this because I'm just on a paid plan and whatever it costs, it costs.
Yeah, yeah.
She's like, we all use Google. Google's free. And it hit me and I was just like, that's right. We look at $200 or $20, whatever plan you're on, we look at that as pennies on the dollar. Google also penetrated all these schools with the Chromebooks. And now she's just like, yeah, she's like, everyone in my school uses Google. No one wants to go to their parents and ask them for $200 or $20 or whatever it costs. Yeah.
Yeah.
It's like, your parents aren't gonna approve it. Hey, mom and dad, I wanna cheat on my homework and, and, uh, use ChatGPT. Can you pay for it? So she's like, they're gonna all say no. So she's just like, we just use Google. She's like, it's great. It's free. You can use it as much as you want. It's like, ChatGPT doesn't work that way. You gotta pay money.
Google is, Google's gonna grind people down. That's what they're gonna do.
But that is a future of the world, right? It can't just be her class. in San Francisco. And by the way, she's in the Bay Area, not in San Francisco, but outside the city. And I was talking to my nephew who's in high school, different school. He's like, yeah, no one uses ChatGPT. We all use Gemini. He's like, ChatGPT is for you old people. He's like, no one's going to pay for this stuff. He's like, why would you pay when you get the same thing for free?
Oh, that's so good.
And It really hit me at that moment. I'm like, they're going to dominate the future generations because it is free. And you know what? Just like people say Google Search is amazing, people have been doing search for a long time, including Bing. Bing isn't bad. I'm assuming you agree with that, Sami. Their algorithm is actually pretty good. It's— yes, Google won the mindshare back in the day, and they have the adoption through all the Android devices and their deal with Apple. But what's really going to help them is they have the adoption, they have the channels and the distribution, and it's free. ChatGPT needs to charge to make money. They need that cash. If they didn't, their business would be in a much worse position today, and it's already hemorrhaging money. Google is the most profitable company in the world, and they're like, $20, $200 a user per month? Who cares about this money? We already make $115, $116 billion a year in profit.
Yep.
Give this stuff away for free. It's the Teams model. I see more companies using Teams. I focus more on enterprise, but I see way more companies using Teams than Slack by far. I can't even count in comparison the difference. It's on a magnitude. And I really believe Teams won that race because it was just free. Forget if the product was better or worse, it was just free, which is the best marketing play ever.
Dude, here, check this out. Speaking of which, okay, so this graph over here shows when you look at this is total top 10 AI chatbot and tool websites in the US, November 2025. Okay, so you can see ChatGPT is number 1 here. Sure, it has 67% traffic share for the AI chatbot websites, but they've dropped 6.55% month on month. We're talking billion monthly visits, which is still a lot, right? But Gemini, look who's coming up from the rear. Gemini here is number 2, 11.16%, but it's up 9.9%. 9.39%, $168 million or so. And then who else is coming up right now? Grok. All these other ones are going down right now, which is interesting to me. I don't even know what PolyBuzz is.
I don't know what PolyBuzz is either. I was talking to my co-founder Mike yesterday because we're both in— he lives in Vegas and I'm here in Vegas visiting, and we're chilling at his clubhouse or the community he lives in. We're just sitting there at the restaurant and he's— we were talking about our roadmap for one of our projects, Ads to the Public. And I told the team to not focus on integrating Perplexity and the team wanted to integrate Perplexity. It's like, oh, I'll just take another week. I'm like, dude, most people don't use Perplexity and don't care about it.
I'm like— I'd rather have that week back.
Yeah. And then Mike's just like, you know, if we're gonna do it, number Because we both agree that you need ChatGPT, which is what we did first. Google, which is almost released, it'll get released sometime in January. And he's just like, it's Grok. And normally I would've said no, but I was like, I actually agree with you. And he's like, why? I'm like, because I saw a different chart than yours, but Gemini and Grok were the 2 main ones growing right now.
Mm-hmm.
It was not traffic-based, it was app-based. And I was just like, you know what? I'm like, I agree with you. I don't think Grok's that important right now, but if we're going to pick another one within 6 months, I would add in Grok.
Yep.
Yep.
So, and by the way, I mean, I use Grok quite a bit to have just explained a lot of the tweets that I look at. But I wanted to show one more thing real quick. This is from the same—
And as Eric's pulling that up, I want to clarify something from Eric and I's viewpoint, because I don't want anyone to assume this. When Eric and I say that we believe ChatGPT, you know, Google and Grok are the leaders, we're not saying there's no room for Claude. There's different purposes for different apps. Like Eric and I both agree that Anthropic will do extremely well when it comes to the development market and—
Enterprise.
And they'll own a large chunk of that market, right? But when you think about from a marketing standpoint, when people are using these tools like search, Just like you use google.com, we believe the winners are going to be ChatGPT, Google, and potentially Groq. We're not giving an order, but if we did have to give an order, it would probably be Google first, ChatGPT second, then Groq third. Yep.
All right, so let me share this real quick. This is just saying how the marketing, the old marketing playbook doesn't work anymore. And this is from Daniel Dayan. This is from the Battery Ventures thing as well. So let me read off this. So the old, SaaS 1.0 playbook for marketing is measure usage depth, gross retention, unit economics early. We're not saying that's not important, but demand gen is becoming much more metrics-driven, not volume-driven, and efficient frontier trade-offs at infrastructure layer influence the application experience. So let me explain what this means in maybe simple terms here. If you look at the chart over here, the data over here, so AI in demand generation now is you have new data and intent signals to surface higher quality leads. Okay, so for example, Yeah. Neil and I, we have decent traffic that comes to our website. And if you're able to enrich the ICP fit people who aren't initially hand raisers, how do you nurture these people? Okay, so how do you— maybe you reach out to them, maybe you start to generate a conversation with them based on what they're interested in, right? You can look at the social graph and how they're behaving. Agents for deeper account research and automated plays and sequences. So for example, Salesforce just bought Qualified, I think, and Qualified will do something like that. Well, they'll kind of enrich people on your site and you know, reach out to them. Personalized engagements, right person, right message, right time. And so it's a lot of the stuff that humans just don't have the time to do at a very high level. And then you have always-on agents to qualify inbound. So I know Jason Lemkin's SaaStr, for example, they use their agents quite a bit to book sponsorships. And it does well for them. And I just think we talked about go-to-market engineers, we talked about vibe coders earlier, I think this is going to apply directly to this new marketing playbook. And those who understand AI will understand how to take advantage of these things. And I think this is just the very beginning, right? And so, you know, all these things that I've wanted to do, to be honest with you, 10 years ago or so, you're now finally able to do it. Like, you know, quickly updating your CRM, closed loss reasons and all that. Like salespeople don't like to update these things. And so I think this is why we keep, you know, shouting from the top, at least I do, on why it's important to become AI fluent. But just wanted to share this piece.
And just be careful with this data that you see. If you look at what Eric's sharing on his screen, he's sharing stuff related to SaaS, which I believe you said Battery, right?
Yep.
Battery Ventures, right? They, they're well known in the SaaS space. But a lot of these VCs and investors do put out data and a lot of it you should take with a grain of salt. Like I remember it was either earlier this year or part of last year, Where BG Squared, that podcast with Brad—
Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley.
Yeah, Bill Gurley. They ended up talking about how SEO is dead. Do you remember that podcast episode? Yeah, yeah, I remember that. And you and I were like, no, it's not dead. But a lot of people are like, look at these guys, they're super successful. If you look at Brad Gerstner, he's managing the Trump money, you know, that Trump fund where people are giving cash.
The Invest in America, the $1,000 per kid.
Yeah, because both Ray Dalio and Michael Dell and family, they invested in that, but he's making a management fee managing that money. Smart guy, rich, but he doesn't know a lick about SEO. And I'm not saying he's not smart, he's smarter than I am, but it's context. It's like saying, oh, a president knows more than Eric and I on everything. We know quite a bit on marketing, We don't know much on politics, right? You got to look at experts and see what they're saying. Not just people who are pulling out data from their sample portfolio company and be like, look, this is how it's working. It's pretty much dead.
You know, Gary Vee used to say SEO is dying. He said this over 10 years ago or so. Still around. So as long as humans are searching, still around, guys.
And Gary Vee's really smart with marketing. He's great with creative, great with social media. He's great with driving attention, but SEO has never been his strong suit. Does it mean, you know, he's right at everything? No. If you look at the marketing that I do, it's more logic-based, numbers-based, less creative-based. I think Eric would agree with this. I'm more stats and data-oriented versus—
We talked about this when I spoke with Gary, that he, I put you, like he even put you two on different spectrums. He's more feeling and brand-based.
Yes.
You're more numbers and logic-based.
And there's no right or wrong. I've built a business doing what I've done. He's built a business doing what he's done. And forget audience size. Gary's done an amazing job. One of the, you know, better entrepreneurs out there.
Very strong operator.
Yeah, extremely strong operator. I would say he's a, you know, A+ entrepreneur. There's— it's hard to find people like him, but I know people who are more successful than both of us who don't have a social following. And one of the people that I know really well is a creative person and they've done extremely well from it. And the other person I know is a SaaS guy and he's done better than both of them. Both of them are on the Forbes list. And the SaaS guy is a data-oriented guy and neither approach is right or wrong. You got to find out what works for you. Entrepreneurs come in different sizes, different skill sets. You gotta find your own way versus saying that everyone fits in the mold. And by no means am I saying that Gary thinks that everyone should fit into a mold or anything like that. I wholeheartedly believe that he knows that everyone has to find their own way. But I would say this one thing, what Gary's— one of the biggest strengths that he has that I think most people Let me guess, let me guess, let me guess.
Can I guess?
Uh-huh.
Yeah, that he can see trends and bet on the trends.
Yes, yes, he's so amazing at seeing trends. One of the best people that I've seen when it comes to internet-based trends by far. And it could be also non-internet-based. I haven't seen all his stuff, but internet-based trends, he's so amazing at that.
If you're in B2B, here's the deal. LinkedIn account-based marketing sucks, but it doesn't have to. With Carrot, it allows you to create Personalized ads towards your customers and also personalized landing pages that align with the ads. So you're going to have higher conversions and influence pipeline reporting to prove that your ABM works. So if you want to learn more, just go to karrot.ai and you can join the waitlist. Again, it's karrot.ai, and we'll see you on the other side. I'll continue on here on— I thought this is an interesting thing that Sam Altman mentioned. So he said Sam Altman revealed OpenAI's internal GDP Val benchmark. Okay, it says ChatGPT 5.2 beats you at 74% of your job. It measured how AI performs on knowledge work tasks across 40+ verticals. So the results: GPT 5.2 beats or ties expert-level knowledge workers at 74.1% of tasks— legal analysis, PowerPoint decks, web apps, financial modeling, customer support. So his description: a coworker you can assign an hour's worth of tasks to get and get something done you prefer back 3 out of 4 times. And so 3 years ago, ChatGPT launched at basically 0% on the scale. Now it's at 74%, and that's available right now. So the crazy thing is, whether it's ChatGPT or something else now, they're able to do tasks, I think, not just for an hour, but for a couple hours at a time. So just imagine the level of tasks. If you actually have an AI that's working on a task for 24 hours at a time, that's the level that we're getting to. And so I just think that's interesting. But going back to your point, I just— to finish off that point around How there's no right way. I think if you're listening to this and maybe you're in your teens or in your 20s or so, you might think that your way is the right way or whatever your mentor is teaching you is the right way or whatever book is teaching you is the right way. But when you start to hit your 30s, you start to realize that there is in fact no right way because how you were brought up, the experiences that you have, the way you approach things is very unique to you. And just so like the way Neil runs his business is different than how I run my business, right? And I've had to learn over time. Neil's had to learn over time too, and we've made a lot of mistakes. And so all that to say is, it goes back to what I was saying earlier. As long as you keep going and you're in a smart way, as long as you keep going about things in a smart way, eventually you'll strike it lucky. You just got to last long enough to get lucky. That's the point.
Yeah, I'm a big believer you just have to last long enough to get lucky as long as you have common sense. If you're stupid, it doesn't matter how much You try at this, dude. We know someone, a mutual friend, okay? And this person enjoys traveling, right? You know who I'm talking about at this point. You know them really well. They work for you for a bit. Okay, so this person enjoys traveling, and they don't work for me at the moment, but they enjoy traveling. You know who I'm talking about?
Yeah.
All right. We both love this person. And this person told me months ago, you know, I just haven't had my luck yet. And I'm like, what do you mean? They're like, you know, one of my other mutual friends, they've had their break. They're a millionaire now. Look, you, you're lucky. Eric's lucky. I haven't had my break yet. And I was like, no, a lot of this isn't luck. A lot of this is Consistently pushing forward, trying hard, learning at what we suck at, and then trying to get better and then doubling down. Or if we can't get better at hiring people to fill in the gaps. And I'm like, if you look at you, you travel a lot, you'll take tons of pictures, and you say you work a lot, but you're always traveling and taking pictures. So how much can you really work? Yeah. So then when they're complaining about life and how it's hard and they just need to get lucky, I don't think that person's ever going to get quote unquote lucky. Why? Because they're not putting the effort, they're not trying to learn, and they make a lot of common mistakes that they should have learned from and gotten better over the years. Now, I didn't mention this person's name because I don't want to, you know, roast them online, but I've given them this feedback in person because I care for them. And Eric knows them and he's given them feedback as well.
You've taken care of this person really well too.
Yes, I've helped them out, you know, like financially struggled, helped them out, although sometimes you shouldn't do that. But I don't regret any of those things. Cherish him as a friend, always will cherish him as a friend. But you're not going to get lucky if you're not willing to put in the effort and learn at improving yourselves and your skills. If you're just willing to stay stagnant and you believe you know everything and you believe you're awesome and amazing at everything, and whenever you get feedback, you think that people are out for you, that's playing the quote unquote victim mentality in my mind. And those people are not going to get lucky.
Yeah, that's why I, I don't think it's that helpful for me personally to think I'm smart or anything like that. It's, it's better to think that you're not that good because you're constantly trying to get better.
Yes, Eric and I don't go around saying we're smart. We actually don't believe we're smart, not because we're trying to trick our minds so that way we learn more. We genuinely think we're not smart. Eric and I could never get into Stanford or Harvard like a lot of these people. We genuinely believe we are not smart. The only reason we both believe we've done decently well, and we actually both don't believe we've done well, we both think we have a long way to go because when you look at a lot of other people there, we're not on the Forbes list. We weren't multi-hundred billionaires or billionaires when we were 30 years old like the Mark Zuckerbergs or whoever it may be. The only reason we've done somewhat well is because we just keep grinding it out and we learn from our mistakes. That's it.
And I would also say, you know, the reason— people might be saying, what's the point of getting there? I just want to, just for fun, I just want to see how far I can go. I don't know what it is for you. You have different reasons maybe?
Yeah, no, it's a goal.
Yeah, I just want to see. And like, I'm good. I'm already— I think everything else is house money right now. You never thought at age 18 you'd be where you are now. I never thought I'd be where I am now. And now I'm just going to keep going. I'm just going to keep free rolling, enjoying my friends and family and all that. One thing I'll say, you've actually teed up a really nice topic because it's been— it's led to my experiments on Threads. So to finish off the thought here, so look, if you work smart, you work hard consistently, you're going to get lucky because I have a very close family friend who throughout his entire life, from all the time I've known him, has just consistently complained about his luck. You're so lucky. You're so lucky. You're so lucky. Okay, so that's not what it is.
Hope you guys have a happy holidays and amazing New Year's. Eric and I wish you amazing 2026.
Yeah, we'll see you in the new year. Bye.
