Google: AI didn't kill search, it blew it up to a five year high

Everyone expected chatbots to eat Google Search. The opposite happened. In Alphabet's Q3 2026 earnings, CEO Sundar Pichai says AI investments are driving overall search query growth, commercial queries included, and that year over year query growth is the highest it has been in five years.

The numbers back him up. Alphabet made $127.6 billion in the quarter, up 25 percent, and is now on a half trillion dollar annual revenue run rate. Search and other revenue rose 12 percent, while Google Cloud more than doubled, up 103 percent to $30.7 billion. Pichai credits demand for AI infrastructure and Google's own TPU chips.

On models, Pichai says Google's first party APIs now process nearly 32 billion tokens per minute, more than four times a year ago, and the Gemini app has reached a billion users, the fastest growing product in the company's history.

The quarter also brought Gemini 4 Argon, the first Googlebook laptops, the Pixel 11 line, NotebookLM's rename to Gemini Notebook, and Demis Hassabis moving from running DeepMind into a chair role.

Short version: the funeral for search is postponed, and AI is the one paying for it.