Google Search Posts Strongest Query Growth in Five Years

By James Calloway

Google reported its strongest year-over-year search query growth in five years on its Q3 earnings call — while the web ecosystem is seeing its lowest levels of referrals from Google. CEO Sundar Pichai tied the surge directly to AI.

What did the Q3 numbers show?

Search advertising revenue grew 12% year-over-year to $63 billion, according to Philipp Schindler, SVP and Chief Business Officer at Google. Query growth included more searches with commercial intent, and that demand fed the double-digit ad revenue growth.

Pichai didn't hedge on the milestone. He said:

"Search has strong momentum. Our AI investments are driving increased usage and overall query growth, including commercial queries. In fact, our year‑over‑year query growth rate is the highest it's been in the last five years."

CFO Anat Ashkenazi put it another way: "Our AI investments in Search are driving our highest query growth in half a decade."

The catch: those record queries aren't converting to revenue at the old rate. The call confirmed a gap between query growth and ad revenue — AI Mode generates additional searches, but those interactions earn less advertising money.

Takeaway: record search volume is arriving at the same time publishers are getting record-low referrals. Both facts come from the same company.

Why did Search growth decelerate from Q2?

Schindler named two drivers, in order:

• Foreign exchange. He called FX "the single largest driver of Search deceleration relative to Q2."
• AI Mode's lower monetization. "It's worth noting that the strong growth in AI Mode queries had an impact because of the lower monetization we were seeing in AI Mode," he said.

Schindler framed the monetization gap as a timing issue, not a structural one. "To be clear, we feel very good about our trajectory here. Our ad experiments have shown promising results and we're now scaling ads within both AI Overviews and AI Mode to more users and more queries; including, as I mentioned, international markets and multiturn ads in the U.S."

Takeaway: Google knows AI searches pay less today and is betting scale and new ad formats close the gap.

How is Google changing what Search does?

Pichai described the bigger shift: Search is becoming a task-completion engine, not an answer engine. He pointed to agents as the next stage of Search's evolution.

"One area I'm excited about is helping people get things done, be it booking reservations, filling in forms, scheduling appointments, or making purchases," Pichai said. "People already put their trust in Google to get things done in their daily lives; and our leadership here remains an important differentiator."

That agentic layer won't stay inside Search. Pichai said Google is bringing these features to Search and to "our billion users on the Gemini app," where people already run "complex, multi‑step agentic queries." He credited the Gemini 4 series with handling those tasks well.

Where do agents fit across Google?

Pichai called agents a "unifying layer" across the company's products:

"Agents will operate as a unifying layer across our products, so you'll see us extend these agentic experiences beyond Search and the Gemini app to Chrome, Android and our Workspace products as well."

He compared the moment to the earlier incorporation of AI chat into Search, which "allowed people to ask more and do more in Search." Agents, he argued, expand the types of problems Google can solve, leaning on infrastructure like the Knowledge Graph built up over years. "I would view it as a new frontier, which brings in a new set of use cases to Search," he said.

What does this mean for the open web?

The call laid out the future plainly. Search becomes the starting point, another Google product sits at the other end, and agents give users more reasons to stay inside Google's ecosystem across Search, Gemini, Chrome, Android and Workspace.

Pichai said nothing about what the agentic transformation means for the web ecosystem — and for SEOs and site owners, that silence is the story: nothing in Google's roadmap points toward sending more referrals to the open web.