Alphabet’s Search and Other segment, the line item that captures Google’s search advertising, grew 17 percent to $63.3 billion in the second quarter of 2026, up from roughly $54.2 billion a year earlier. That single figure is now the strongest data point yet against the argument that AI Overviews are hollowing out Google’s search business.
The segment sits inside a bigger earnings story. Total Google advertising revenue, which folds in YouTube ads and the Google Network segment alongside search, rose 14.5 percent to $81.6 billion. Total Alphabet revenue climbed 24 percent to $119.8 billion, the company’s largest quarter by overall revenue on record. YouTube ads grew 13 percent, Google Cloud accelerated to 82 percent growth, and the Google Network segment declined by roughly 1 percent. Each of those numbers describes a different part of the business, and conflating them obscures rather than clarifies what actually happened in Search.
Sundar Pichai tied the results directly to the merged AI answer experience. “Our momentum starts with Search, where people are adopting one seamless search experience across AI Overviews and AI Mode,” he said. “We saw 17% revenue growth in Search and Other. And YouTube Ads grew 13%.” The framing is notable for what it does in one breath: it credits the AI surface with driving the query volume that produced the ad growth, presenting consolidation of AI Overviews and AI Mode as a monetization win rather than a risk to be managed.
That framing is where a search team needs to slow down. Seventeen percent search ad growth answers exactly one question: is Google successfully selling ads against queries, including the ones that now surface an AI-generated answer first. It says nothing about whether those same queries are still sending clicks to third-party websites at the rate they did before AI Overviews existed. Ad revenue and referral traffic are counted by entirely different systems, and a platform can grow one while shrinking the other. Google monetizing the AI answer surface and Google sending clicks to the open web are two separate questions, and this earnings number only answers the first.
The earnings release gestures at the second question without resolving it. Pichai said Google is “now sending billions of clicks to websites every week through AI features in Search,” a figure aimed squarely at publisher anxiety. It is also an unaudited, self-reported number with no baseline for comparison: billions of clicks could represent growth, decline, or roughly flat referral volume relative to before AI Overviews launched, and the earnings call gave no year-over-year context to tell which. A number without a comparison point is a claim, not evidence.
There is a historical parallel worth naming. Google has offered variations of the “we still send billions of clicks” line since AI Overviews first rolled out broadly, and independent referral-traffic studies from publishers and SEO tool vendors have continued to show organic click-through declines on informational queries where an AI Overview appears. Strong ad-revenue growth in the same period those studies were published does not contradict them. It confirms that Google can grow ad revenue and shrink publisher referrals simultaneously, because advertisers pay for exposure to a query regardless of whether the person clicks through to a third-party site afterward.
For a search team, the actionable read on this earnings report is narrow but real. Record ad revenue growth is a signal about Google’s business health and query volume, not a signal about your own referral-traffic trajectory. Teams that have been waiting for a slowdown in AI Overviews investment, on the theory that falling ad revenue would eventually force Google’s hand, should treat that theory as closed. The number to keep tracking is not Alphabet’s quarterly search revenue; it is your own site’s organic click-through rate on queries where an AI Overview or AI Mode answer now appears above the fold.
Barry Schwartz reported the figures for Search Engine Roundtable on July 22, 2026, covering Alphabet’s Q2 2026 earnings release.
