Google's AI search problem finally shows up in the earnings report, some investors believe

Key Points

- Google's stock dropped as much as ten percent after search revenue grew just 12 percent in the third quarter, missing the 15 percent analysts had expected.

- Management acknowledged that the fast-growing AI mode brings in less revenue than traditional search. Cloud revenue, by contrast, more than doubled year over year to $30.7 billion, up 103 percent.

- Google is doubling down on AI buildout: capital spending hit $51.4 billion in the third quarter alone, and the company expects it to "increase significantly" in 2027.

Google lost up to ten percent of its market value because an old investor fear appears to be coming true.

Search revenue grew about 12 percent in the third quarter, missing the 15 percent analysts had expected, and the shortfall might point to a tension in Google's core business. AI-powered search queries are growing fast but still generate less money than traditional search.

Google partly confirmed this on the earnings call. Executive Philipp Schindler said that "the strong growth in AI mode queries had an impact because of the lower monetization," among other factors. The company nonetheless said it was satisfied with the overall trajectory and reported that the annual growth rate for search queries hit its highest level in five years.

And part of the truth is that traditional search has been declared dead for years and keeps growing anyway. This quarter's growth rate was slightly below expectations but in line with recent years, and Google is only beginning to monetize AI mode. On the call, the company announced plans to expand its ad program for chatbots in the U.S. and internationally.

CEO Sundar Pichai said the Gemini app has reached one billion users, making it the fastest-growing product in the company's history. That is hardly a surprise, given that it is essentially a search add-on, and search is already huge. Google's APIs for its own models process nearly 32 billion tokens per minute, more than four times as many as a year ago. Part of that jump likely reflects token inflation driven by reasoning models and agentic workflows rather than higher usage alone.

Cloud revenue more than doubles as Google spends heavily on what comes next

The cloud division grew 103 percent year over year to $30.7 billion, and Google is spending accordingly. Capital expenditures hit $51.4 billion in the third quarter alone. The full-year 2026 forecast remains at $195 billion to $205 billion, with a "significantly higher" figure expected for 2027.

Cloud chief Thomas Kurian expects AI agents to drive further growth in the cloud business, since more agents in production require more compute for their tasks, more storage for agent memory, and more database capacity for reasoning, he said.

Google stands to gain on both sides, through its own consumer products and through the infrastructure other companies run on. Pichai said the company is building smaller, distilled versions of its new Carbon model that balance quality and response speed, and plans to serve them to "billions" of users through an always-on cloud runtime. The full Carbon model will initially go only to selected cybersecurity experts and the U.S. government.

Google also wants to sell AI infrastructure built on its proprietary TPU systems. Management did not disclose the profit margin on selling those systems to outside customers, even when asked twice.

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