After 10 years well below the summit of "Globes" top brands, Google is back at the top as the favorite brand of readers after wresting back the AI advantage of ChatGPT with its own AI assistant Gemini.
In November 2022 the tables were turned on Google. Until then, the US tech giant was not only the world’s largest and most significant search engine, but also the tech company that knew its consumer audience most intimately. This was due to control of the most popular search engine, the most widely used browser, and a strategic partnership with Apple, which together allowed Google to best learn the preferences and needs of its users.
But at the end of 2022, all that changed. After several years of working under the radar and in complete secrecy, OpenAI launched ChatGPT, changing the world forever.
For Google executives, this set off alarms. ChatGPT became the most talked-about and viral product, reaching a million users in just five days, a feat that had taken Google itself a whole year to achieve. But that wasn’t the only reason Google was fazed, more importantly it was the way ChatGPT created an intimate connection with users. Instead of just a few search terms, the chat engine allows you to ask a question in normal human language and receive a detailed and reasoned answer. This is how OpenAI fulfilled Google’s deepest desire: the ability to let users speak in their own language and receive in return a much better answer than a collection of links.
As of today, it seems that Google has completed the transformation and has the upper hand again. The search giant and its CEO, Sundar Pichai, have made good use of the last three years to return to power, as demonstrated by the choice of "Globes" readers to once again rank the company, for the first time in several years, in the brand index, overtaking cherished brands like Waze. Not only did Google beat beloved Israeli brands like Osem's Bamba, Sano, Yotvata, and Tnuva, and technology brands like Samsung, Apple, and Microsoft, it also rose above newer brands in the world of social networks like WhatsApp, Instagram, Telegram, and TikTok. How did Google overcome disruption and climb its way back to the top?
Closing the technological gap with ChatGPT
Google launched its chat engine only in March 2023, four months after ChatGPT established itself as a pioneer in the field of AI. At the time, Google called it Bard, which was a commercial failure. Only a year later, it was relaunched, this time under the brand it is now known as - Gemini. However, it was only in November 2025, exactly two years after the launch of ChatGPT, that Google managed to close the gap it had opened with Sam Altman's company with the launch of Gemini 3, which received positive reviews.
Along with it, the technology giant launched products that stimulated the imagination, including the video model Veo3, which at that time achieved OpenAI's video model (Sora) in, among other things, the sound quality accompanying the videos, and the photo editing model Nano-Banana, which also received positive reviews.
At that time, organizations and companies first began to adopt Gemini as one of Google's autonomous code generators as a software development tool that is not inferior to rivals such as Anthropic's Cloud, Cognition's Windsurf, and Cursor, which was recently sold to SpaceX.
But the biggest advantage for Google, which is almost non-existent for other companies, certainly not for OpenAI and Anthropic, is the possibility of implementing the Gemini model in each of its products, through its control of the search, browser, and mobile markets. Thus, the basic search bar was replaced by a window that allows you to ask a question and receive a detailed and summarized answer (in a mode known as AI Overviews) and an interface that allows dialogue similar to a chat engine experience (AI Mode). As part of this, the Android operating systems received a software upgrade that allows phones to process more AI tasks on the device, thus optimizing and accelerating usage and relieving Google's busy data centers.
In addition, graphics processors developed and manufactured by Google, TPUs, which compete with Nvidia's GPUs, were built specifically to handle the nature of the computational workloads of AI processing in the company's data centers, reducing the heavy AI costs imposed on companies that are forced to find hardware solutions from outside. Google is the only company today that owns the entire AI value chain from chips, through smartphones, browsers, operating systems to user applications such as Gmail, Drive, Workspace and Nano-Banana.
Google has begun marketing packages that combine file storage services, the Flow video file creation service, which is based, among other things, on the Veo video model, use of desktop software, the Notebook LLM research and presentation application, and a service that allows the construction of AI agents to create tasks on all of Google's applications.
Google's advertising formula
Fiverr VP growth Idan Raz says, "Google made a significant move back into the public discourse by making AI accessible to consumers with a collection of viral products in the world of AI such as Nano-Banana and Veo3, some of which were so good that they forced competitors out of the market (OpenAI's Sora). What worked for them no less well was the integration of Gemini into all of their search products - the combination of this with the familiar and well-known user experience with Google was done relatively smoothly and gave Google a power multiplier over its competitors."
Raz believes that one of Google's trump cards that is less likely to be talked about in the context of Gemini is its advertising engine. "Google could not afford not to introduce advertising into its artificial intelligence interface - and yet they chose to do so gradually and relatively slowly. They preferred to create transparency among advertisers regarding the effectiveness of advertising in the system - a move that was not obvious in the historical Google - and this in turn created trust among advertisers so that they began to advertise in the AI interface as well."
According to College of Management head of Marketing and Strategy Department Dr. Gila Oren Google managed to pull off a pincer action that only it is capable of. She says, "To be at the same time the largest company with the most influence on the end user, and on the other hand to create the most intimate level with the user. The customer journey starts with the search bar, but it continues on YouTube, on Android, and gains additional volume with apps like Gemini, which are often offered for free to many users and the AI video and photo apps."
However, says Oren, the big question mark about its success down the road is how it preserves advertising revenue in an era when all the answers and information to the user are presented as a summary at the top of the page, as reflected in the AI Overviews interface.
Raz reveals that the disadvantage has actually become an advantage for Google, which absurdly actually increased advertising revenue: "The damage from the new interface is focused on those who built on organic traffic from the search engine and now the change forces companies to take the high road and invest in advertising on Google or in advertising based on the chat engine (GEO)."
The Israel connection
Google didn't just become a leading brand in Israel. The company has had extensive ties to the Israeli market for 20 years, first establishing local operations in Tel Aviv and Haifa, and has continued to maintain an active presence in Israel even since the outbreak of the war, when other tech companies distanced themselves from Israel.
Amazon, a franchisee in the Israeli government’s Nimbus cloud tender, spreads pro-Palestinian propaganda on its internal social channels, while CEO Andy Jassy refused to comment on the kidnapping of employee Sasha Troufanov until the moment he was released in the deal. Microsoft's top brass adopted a chilly stance toward Israel, and in particular toward the Ministry of Defense, following media revelations, and disconnected Unit 8200 from using its cloud, Azure, and, as revealed in Globes last month, conducted a comprehensive review of the use made of its systems by the Israeli military and Ministry of Defense.
At Google, as at other tech giants, there have been employee protests against Israel, but Pichai took care to deal harshly with those who overstepped the mark. Google continues to be the Israeli government's franchisee in the Nimbus cloud tender, to benefit from the migration of units in the Ministry of Defense from Microsoft to Google after the 8200 incident and to increase its influence on the sector.
Earlier This year, the company scored a small victory when it got the accountant general to announce the introduction of its competitor to Microsoft's Office products, Workspace, to government offices and government companies. After 40 years of complete Office dominance, for the first time, people in the public sector will also be able to work on a Google word processor or spreadsheet.
Bamba ranks second
Elsewhere in the rankings perennial Israeli favorite snack Bamba was placed second, followed by traffic navigation app Waze in third and WhatsApp in fourth. Google Maps was fifth, Samsung sixth, Sano seventh, Microsoft eighth, and the tyop ten was rounded out by local food companies Yotvata in ninth and Tnuva in tenth.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on July 16, 2026.
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