Google Queries Are Growing Faster Than Search Revenue, with AI Mode a Factor

Alphabet said Google search queries grew at their fastest rate in five years. Yet Search & other revenue rose 12% in the third quarter, slower than in the earlier quarters of 2026. As Search Engine Journal reported on November 5, Google attributes part of the slowdown to AI Mode: queries in this format are increasing, but they currently generate less revenue than traditional search queries.

Why query growth didn’t translate into revenue growth

Search & other revenue reached $63.35 billion. It grew 19% in the first quarter and 17% in the second, while the third-quarter figure came in about $1.6 billion below analysts’ expectations. Google did not give an exact query growth rate: Sundar Pichai said only that it was the highest in five years. He was not claiming a record number of queries in absolute terms.

Google’s chief business officer, Philipp Schindler, listed several reasons for the slowdown. Of the individual factors, he said currency fluctuations had the greatest impact. Some advertisers in the Asia-Pacific region cut spending after the EU ended a tax exemption for low-value imports. Advertising spend in media and entertainment returned to normal after a quarter that included the World Cup. Another factor was the rapid growth of AI Mode queries, which have lower monetization.

Chief financial officer Anat Ashkenazi added that the year-over-year comparison had become tougher: search growth began accelerating in the third quarter of 2025. The article’s author considers most of the factors listed to be temporary, while AI Mode’s impact could grow as adoption increases. That is the author’s assessment, not a Google forecast.

There is no way to allocate the five-percentage-point slowdown precisely among these factors: Alphabet does not publish search revenue adjusted separately for currency movements. The author estimates that currency fluctuations may account for one or two points, but that estimate relies on company-wide figures. It cannot establish AI Mode’s share of the slowdown.

How Google is changing ads in AI answers

It is unclear how Google counts queries within an AI Mode conversation. According to the company, these queries are three times longer on average than traditional ones, and an interaction can involve several turns. Google has not said whether it counts each turn as a separate query. So the reported five-year high in query growth tells us little about how much the number of users has grown, or how many tasks they bring to search.

Google is expanding ads in AI Overviews and AI Mode to more users and queries. The company is bringing AI Mode ads to international markets for the first time and introducing ads for multi-turn conversations in the US. Schindler described the results of its ad experiments as encouraging, but the article gives no separate revenue figure for these placements. We previously covered how Google described search and AI as a single product.

Schindler also shared an observation about product listings: paid and organic product listings in AI Mode already receive clicks at roughly the same rate. This does not mean organic visibility is disappearing. But as ads expand, paid placements will compete with organic listings for attention within the answer, before a shopper even reaches a website.

What retailers and marketers should check

Start with important queries in your product category and save examples of AI Mode answers. Note where your store appears, where competitors appear, and which answers include ad placements alongside them. Checking again in a quarter will show what has changed in your category specifically; Google’s aggregate figures will not.

This kind of monitoring supplements data on visits and orders; it does not replace it. If paid listings start appearing where organic product listings used to be visible, that gives you a concrete reason to review your ad budget. But without comparing the change with your website’s results, you cannot say that it gained or cost you sales.

Keep verified metrics separate from claims made without a disclosed methodology. Alphabet reports revenue, but Google has not provided an exact query growth rate or explained how it counts AI Mode queries. Its claim that most AI Mode queries are additive to traditional search cannot be verified from the published data. The next quarterly report will show how revenue is trending, but it may not answer these questions.

My take: look at the customer journey

I wouldn’t take the gap between query and revenue growth as a sign that SEO no longer matters. The format of search answers is changing, but stores still need search visibility, a clear product catalog, and good product pages. I’d start by looking not at a checklist of meta tags, but at how a shopper searches for a product: do they see the store in the answer, and what do they find after clicking through?

For a small store, regularly checking a few important queries is more useful than guessing what share of AI Mode will eventually be taken up by ads. And I’d look at the catalog and checkout on a phone first. Visibility can bring a shopper in, but a difficult product selection or checkout process can stop them from buying.

Sources

Where the news comes from. The text is a retelling in the author’s own words; the facts come from the source, the opinion is the author’s.

1. Google Search Queries Hit A 5-Year High, And Search Revenue Didn’t Follow via @sejournal, @DuaneForrester www.searchenginejournal.com

About the author

Hanna Hakala

SEO consultant for online stores

I help stores sort out their catalog structure and content gaps. When teaching, I usually start with how shoppers search for a product, not with a list of meta tags.

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