Google says its investments in AI are driving more searches

October 28, 2026 · by TPW Pipeline

Google’s year-over-year search query growth rate is ‘the highest it’s been in the last five years.’

by Jay PetersOct 28, 2026, 8:22 PM UTC Jay Peters is a senior reporter covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme.

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.

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