Alphabet reported in its Q3 2026 earnings that its artificial intelligence investments are producing significant growth in Google searches compared with a year earlier. The company said the gains extend to commercial queries, the searches tied to shopping and purchasing. The results put the search business, which remains Google's core advertising engine, at the center of the company's AI story.
CEO Sundar Pichai said in a statement that the company's AI spending is fueling growth in overall search volume, including commercial queries. He added that the year-over-year query growth rate is the highest it has been in five years. The company did not provide a specific figure for that growth rate in the cited remarks.
The earnings report caps a busy quarter for Google. The company announced its Gemini 4 Argon frontier model and released it widely this month. It also said Gemini crossed 1 billion monthly users.
On the hardware side, Google revealed the first five Googlebook laptops and launched the Pixel 11 line of smartphones, the new Pixel Watch and the forthcoming Pixel Tag. It also raised the price of the Google TV Streamer.
The quarter brought software and branding changes as well. Google renamed NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook. It also made a major shakeup of its top AI leadership, which included former DeepMind leader Demis Hassabis stepping into a chair role.
The search growth matters for the US market, where Google's search ads underpin a large share of digital advertising spending and where the company faces continuing scrutiny over how AI-generated results affect the queries publishers and retailers depend on. Alphabet's report ties the AI buildout directly to query volume rather than to any specific product line.
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