ChatGPT's thing always seems to have been to be the best LLM, hence the most users without much advertising and the most investment money to support their dominance. If they drop to second or third best it may cause them problems because they rely on investor money to pay the rather large bills.

Currently they are not #1 in any of the categories on LLM arena, and even on user numbers where they have dominated, Google is catching up, 650m monthly for Gemini, 800m for ChatGPT.

Also Google/Hassabis don't show much sign of slacking off (https://youtu.be/rq-2i1blAlU?t=860)

Funnily enough Google had a "Chat Bot Is a ‘Code Red’ for Google’s Search Business" thing back in 2022 but seem to have got it together https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/21/technology/ai-chatgpt-goo...