Google is flying higher after launching Gemini 3, which is getting the kind of reception usually reserved for surprise album drops. The model’s newest upgrade packs sharper reasoning, smoother agentic tasks, and “vibe coding,” which sounds like a joke but is apparently a real thing that developers are already loving. It is now topping LMArena’s rankings for text, web dev, and vision, giving Google a badly needed headline win. $GOOGL ( ▼ 0.65% )
Consumers are showing up too. Gemini is sitting at No. 2 in the App Store’s free charts, right behind ChatGPT. That’s a big deal for a company that still makes most of its money from people typing questions into a search box. If chatbots keep replacing searches, Google needs its chatbot to be the one doing the replacing.
This isn’t just about bragging rights inside the AI lab. Google is threading its models through search, ads, and Cloud, and every quality jump gives the company new ways to defend the empire. Investors seem to approve. The stock climbed more than 5 percent in a tech-green session, adding to a month-long streak of wins.
The momentum has been building. Google crushed Q3 expectations, got a $5.1 billion nod from Berkshire Hathaway, and announced a $40 billion data center blitz in Texas. It is also the runaway leader of the Magnificent 7 this year, up nearly 60 percent while Nvidia and Microsoft trail behind.
For a company that spent the past year being accused of “falling behind,” Gemini 3 is the closest thing to a victory lap Google has had in a while.