During an hours-long outage on Tuesday impacting Microsoft-backed (MSFT) OpenAI's ChatGPT, searches for "Gemini," Google's artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, increased, indicating that Google's efforts to position itself as an alternative to the AI pioneer may be finding traction.

The ChatGPT outage affected all users

OpenAI reported an outage that impacted all ChatGPT users for many hours on Tuesday. "We experienced a major outage, affecting all users on all ChatGPT plans," OpenAI stated in an incident report.

The disruptions began early Tuesday morning and were rectified at 1 p.m. ET the same day, according to OpenAI. The firm did not disclose the reason for the outage. The ChatGPT breakdown occurred shortly after OpenAI unveiled their latest AI model, GPT-4o.

Searches for 'Gemini' Increase During Outage

During the ChatGPT outage. Google searches for "Gemini," Google's AI chatbot, increased to 327,058 on Tuesday, up over 60% from the 204,991 average daily search traffic between May 4 and June 3, according to software startup QRFY. It stated that searches for "Microsoft Copilot" increased, but less strongly than those for Gemini.

Marc Porcar, CEO of QRFY, stated, "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."

He pointed out "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," stating that "in ChatGPT's absence, it seems clear that people turn to Gemini.

Microsoft shares finished 0.6% higher at $416.07 on Tuesday, while Google parent Alphabet (GOOGL) shares rose 0.4% to $173.79.