Google has overtaken Naver to claim the top spot in South Korea's mobile productivity app market for the first time. The generative artificial intelligence (AI) boom is now reshaping the mobile search and portal landscape as well.

According to data from Mobile Index, operated by AI tech company IGAWorks, the Google app recorded 47,022,854 monthly active users (MAU) in June 2024, taking first place. The gap with the second-ranked Naver app (46,845,017 users) is 177,837. This is the first time Google has surpassed Naver since Mobile Index began compiling statistics in March 2021.

Google's ascent has been rapid. After surpassing 40 million users in May of last year, it exceeded 46 million in May of this year and narrowed the gap with Naver to 245,836 in June. Then, within just one month, the rankings reversed. The industry attributes the user growth to the expansion of Google's AI model 'Gemini' and the strengthening of its AI search capabilities.

Meanwhile, the Naver app has shown a trend of stagnation or modest growth in monthly users, hovering in the 43 to 46 million range since January 2023. As Naver is also continuously upgrading its AI service features, some observers note that the future competitive landscape warrants further monitoring.

Google Chrome took third place (42,457,506 users).

OpenAI's ChatGPT also showed remarkable progress. As recently as March of last year, ChatGPT's monthly users hovered around 5 million, but it surpassed 10 million in April, overtaking the Daum app (then around 7.6 million) for the first time. It has steadily widened the gap since, recording 16,456,151 users last month to rank 7th among productivity apps. During the same period, the Daum app's user count stood at 6,307,395, making it approximately 2.6 times smaller than ChatGPT's.

The prevailing analysis is that the expansion of Google and ChatGPT users is tied to the growing adoption of generative AI services. However, ChatGPT's user base still significantly trails those of Google and Naver. Furthermore, since this is the first time Google has surpassed Naver in monthly users, some opinions suggest that more observation is needed to determine whether this ranking shift will become permanent.