Google is taking ads in its AI-powered Search products to international markets for the first time. It announced the move Wednesday on Alphabet’s third-quarter earnings call, as its core search ad business keeps slowing down. According to TechCrunch AI, Alphabet reported $127.6 billion in revenue, up 25% year over year. Shares still fell 8% after the results came out.
The reason is simple. Search is still Google’s main money-maker, and it’s growing more slowly every quarter. The company now needs AI Search to bring in real ad revenue, not just keep users around.
📌 Quick Summary
- What happened: Google is expanding ads in AI Mode to international markets. It’s also launching multi-turn ads and more ads in AI Mode in the U.S.
- Why now: Search revenue grew 12% year over year in Q3, down from 17% in Q2 and 19% in Q1.
- Early signal: Google says click-through rates for sponsored product listings in AI Mode already match organic listings.
- Market reaction: Alphabet stock fell 8% as investors focused on the Search slowdown, not the overall revenue beat.
- Who should care: Advertisers, SEO teams, publishers and anyone whose traffic depends on Google.
💰 What Google Actually Said
Chief business officer Philipp Schindler laid it out for investors: “We are now scaling high-quality ads within AI overviews in AI mode to more users and queries. This includes taking our monetization footprint global for the first time.”
This builds on what Google showed in May, when it introduced Gemini-powered ad formats. Those included conversational discovery ads that answer users’ questions, and sponsored recommendations placed inside AI-generated answers. Until now, most of that was limited to the U.S. Today’s announcement takes the model worldwide.
Google’s claim about click-through rates is the number to watch. If people click sponsored products in AI Mode as often as organic results, the ads don’t feel out of place. That’s the fear Google has to overcome. Ads that seem tacked onto an AI answer could hurt trust in the answer itself.
🔍 Search Usage Is Changing
CEO Sundar Pichai said Search queries grew at their fastest year-over-year rate in five years, though he didn’t give the exact figure. He credited the AI features. A few numbers he shared:
- AI Mode queries are three times longer than traditional searches on average
- One in five AI Mode searches worldwide uses voice, images or documents
- Google now handles more than 50 billion visual searches per month
“People are using our AI features more, searching in entirely new ways,” Pichai told investors. “Their queries are longer, personalized, and multimodal.”
What stands out here is the gap between usage and revenue. People are searching more than ever, but Search revenue is growing more slowly. A query isn’t the same as a monetizable query. A longer, conversational session may show fewer ad slots than ten blue links did. Multi-turn ads look like Google’s fix: ads that show up as the conversation continues, not just after the first question.
📊 The Bigger Financial Picture
The rest of Alphabet looks strong:
- Google Services (including Search): $96.3 billion, up 11%
- Google Cloud: $30.7 billion, up 103%
Cloud is now carrying much of the growth story, helped by AI infrastructure demand. The quarter also included the release of Gemini 4 Argon, the Gemini app passing 1 billion monthly users, and the Pixel 11 launch. Still, Wall Street’s 8% sell-off shows where its attention is. Cloud can’t fully make up for a slowdown in the business that funds everything else.
⚡ What This Means for You
For advertisers: Expect AI Mode inventory in your markets soon if you’re outside the U.S. Product feeds, landing pages and creative need to work in a conversational setting, where your ad sits next to an AI answer rather than above a list of links.
For marketers and SEO teams: Longer, multimodal queries reward content that answers specific, detailed questions. Keyword-stuffed pages built for short queries will matter less.
For publishers: More ads inside AI answers probably means fewer clicks out to the open web. That trend has been building all year, and global ad expansion speeds it up.
For the AI industry: Google is the first big player to try monetizing generative AI search at global scale. OpenAI, Perplexity and Microsoft will watch closely to see whether conversational ads can match the economics of classic search.
🔮 What Comes Next
The next few quarters will show whether AI Mode ads can halt the Search slowdown or only soften it. If click-through rates hold as the formats roll out globally, Google has a template the rest of the industry will copy. If they don’t, the pressure on Search margins will grow. Full details of the earnings call are in TechCrunch AI’s original report.