Alphabet reported Google Search & other revenue of $63.35 billion for Q3 2026, up 12% year over year after 19% growth in Q1 and 17% in Q2. Its 10-Q shows paid clicks up 8%, down from 13% in each earlier quarter, while cost-per-click rose 4%. CEO Sundar Pichai said query growth was the highest in five years, including commercial queries.
Asked by J.P. Morgan analyst Doug Anmuth why queries outgrew revenue, Chief Business Officer Philipp Schindler named currency as the largest factor, then said AI Mode query growth "had an impact because of the lower monetization we were seeing in AI Mode." He argued that most AI Mode queries are incremental and upper-funnel, creating more monetization opportunities over time.
The same day, Google VP Shivani Mohan said on the Ads Decoded podcast that people now arrive earlier in buying journeys with longer questions. Google says it is launching multi-turn ads in AI Mode in the U.S. and expanding AI Mode ads internationally. Its only published ad metric, per Search Ads VP Shashi Thakur, is that click-through rates are similar for sponsored and organic product listings in AI Mode, based on two weeks of internal data.
Search Engine Journal columnist Greg Jarboe notes ads inside AI Overviews require broad match or keywordless campaigns, and points to six optional conversational Merchant Center attributes Google added in May.