Google says its investments in AI are driving more searches

Google parent company Alphabet says that its AI investments are leading to a big growth in searches year-over-year, as noted in its Q3 2026 earnings today. “Our AI investments are driving overall Search query growth, including commercial queries,” CEO Sundar Pichai says in a statement. “In fact, our year-over-year query growth rate is the highest it’s been in the last five years.” Alphabet’s consolidated revenues for the quarter were $127.6 billion, up 25 percent year-over-year, with its “Google Search & other” revenues up 12 percent year-over-year. Google Cloud revenue was also up 103 percent year-over-year to $30.7 billion. Alphabet also says it passed 150 million YouTube Music and Premium subscribers globally, though that figure includes trials. The earnings follow a packed quarter for Google, including the announcement of its Gemini 4 Argon frontier model (which it released widely this month); crossing 1 billion monthly users in Gemini; the reveal of the first five Googlebook laptops; a price hike for the Google TV Streamer; renaming NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook; the launch of the Pixel 11 line of smartphones, the new Pixel Watch, and the forthcoming Pixel Tag; and a major shakeup of its top AI leadership that included former DeepMind leader Demis Hassabis stepping into a chair role.