Google Back on Top?

With multimodal hits (NotebookLM, V3, “Nano Banana”) and fast shipping from DeepMind, Google’s momentum looks very real.

Google dodges a Chrome divestiture, doubles down on multimodal, and turns distribution into an AI advantage—here’s how the company clawed back momentum and what it means for teams.

How Google rebuilt its AI momentum

Eighteen months ago, Google looked late and clumsy—rushed Gemini demos, messy image outputs, and “AI Overviews” gaffes fed a narrative of drift. But behind the noise, leadership consolidated AI efforts under DeepMind, then shipped a torrent of useful features. NotebookLM’s Audio Overviews turned source docs into listenable explainers and became a sleeper hit for students, lawyers, and creators. On coding, Gemini 2.x variants pushed hard on long-context, agentic workflows, and generous free quotas—fueling a surge in token consumption. Meanwhile, Google’s multimodal bet paid off: V3 fused video + sound in one shot (no more stitching), and “Nano Banana” (Gemini 2.5 Flash Image) nailed prompt-faithful edits that unlocked real business tasks. Result: multiple Google properties climbed into the top GenAI apps, and prediction markets started tipping Google for the lead. The bigger story isn’t a single model; it’s shipping cadence plus distribution muscle finally clicking.

Chrome, distribution—and the antitrust green light

A federal ruling means Google won’t be forced to sell Chrome and can still pay for default placements (sans exclusivity), while sharing some search data with rivals. Practically, that preserves the playbook that scaled Search—and potentially extends it to Gemini. In the opening moves of the AI browser wars (Perplexity’s Comet, rumored OpenAI browser), keeping Chrome gives Google the largest on-ramp for multimodal assistants, agents, and dev tools. Pair that with hardware ambitions (AI chips beyond Nvidia), and Google can bundle models, tooling, and distribution like few can. Caveats remain: ChatGPT still dominates brand mindshare; Anthropic is sprinting in coding; Meta and xAI are aggressively hiring and racking compute; China’s open models keep improving. But even if we only score multimodal—video, image editing, world models—Google’s trajectory is undeniably up and to the right. For software teams, expect faster GA releases, deeper IDE integrations, and more “router-first” UX that hides model choices behind outcomes.