Google’s Revenue is EXPLODING. But Are Brands Winning Too?

Google just posted one of its strongest quarters in years.

Search ad revenue up 19% year on year. Cloud breaking $20 billion for the first time. Products built on Gemini growing over 800%.

If you’re a marketing leader watching those numbers scroll past, you’d be forgiven for thinking everything is rosy. Google is thriving, search is growing, and the AI doomsayers got it wrong.

But here’s the thing — Google doing well and your brand doing well are not the same thing. Behind those headline figures lies a far more complex picture for the businesses competing inside those search results. AI Overviews are reshaping click behaviour. Personalised search is fragmenting rankings. And a new wave of agentic commerce could mean Google completes transactions without users ever visiting your website.

So what do these numbers actually mean for your marketing strategy? And more importantly, what should you be doing about it?

Charlie Marchant, CEO of Exposure Ninja, and Dale Davies, Head of Marketing at Exposure Ninja, break down the key takeaways from Google’s latest earnings call — and what marketing leaders at mid-sized and Enterprise businesses need to prioritise right now.

Executive Summary

Google’s Q1 earnings show a company firing on all cylinders — but the growth is overwhelmingly driven by AI monetisation, not traditional organic search performance.

Search ad revenue climbed 19%, queries hit an all-time high, and AI Overviews are credited as a key growth driver. For brands, however, the picture is more nuanced. Organic clickthrough rates are shifting, personalised search results are making rank tracking less reliable, and agentic commerce threatens to keep users inside Google rather than sending them to your website.

The takeaway for marketing leaders: the “doom narrative” around AI killing search is wrong, but so is the assumption that Google’s growth automatically translates to growth for the brands appearing in its results. The businesses that will thrive are those adapting their strategies now — not panicking, not ignoring the shifts, but building plans grounded in customer data and diversified across channels.

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Why Is Google’s Search Revenue Growing So Fast

The headline numbers from Google’s earnings call are hard to ignore. Search and other advertising revenue grew 19% year on year. Cloud revenue broke $20 billion for the first time — up 63%. Paid subscriptions hit 350 million. And revenue from products built on Gemini and cloud grew over 800%.

These are enormous figures, and they tell a clear story: Google is monetising AI successfully and at scale.

But what’s driving the 19% surge in search ad revenue specifically? Charlie Marchant believes part of the answer lies in how brands are reacting to the changing search landscape.

“I think there is a resurgence of using Google Ads as a way to mitigate the effects of organic being different to how it used to be and making sure that those businesses are still getting clicks,” Charlie explains.

In other words, a meaningful chunk of that ad revenue growth may be fear-driven. Brands are watching organic traffic dip — or at least shift — and responding by pumping more budget into paid search to compensate. Impressions may be stable or even climbing, but clickthrough rates on organic results are changing thanks to AI Overviews occupying prime real estate at the top of the page.

There’s an irony here worth noting. Google’s AI Overviews may be suppressing some organic clicks, which pushes brands towards Google Ads, which drives Google’s ad revenue higher. Google wins either way.

It’s also worth recognising that the narrative around ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude stealing Google’s lunch has been dramatically overstated — at least for now. Google CEO Sundar Pichai reported that queries are at an all-time high, with AI Overviews actively driving overall search growth. The idea that AI chatbots are gutting Google Search simply doesn’t hold up when you look at the data.

Charlie puts it directly: “That kind of doomish narrative, that ChatGPT and Perplexity and AI Overviews is just completely gutting Google Search isn’t really what’s showing in these numbers.”

Should Brands Be Scared of AI Overviews

AI Overviews have been live for over a year now, and they remain one of the most frequently discussed concerns among marketing leaders. The question keeps coming up at webinars, in boardrooms, and in strategy meetings: what do we do about zero-click search?

Charlie’s perspective is characteristically direct. If you’re still scared of AI Overviews in 2026, the problem isn’t AI Overviews — it’s that you haven’t adapted your strategy.

“If people are still scared in 2026, it’s because they haven’t yet shifted their SEO strategy to understand how AI Overviews and other AI platforms are part of that search journey,” she says.

That doesn’t mean the impact isn’t real. AI Overviews do occupy significant real estate on the search engine results page. They do change click behaviour. And for some queries, they provide enough information that users never need to click through to a website at all.

But the data tells a more nuanced story than the panic suggests. Impressions may remain stable while clickthrough rates shift — and critically, that shift doesn’t always correlate with a drop in conversions. Some businesses report that while raw click volume has decreased, the clicks they are receiving convert at a higher rate because users arrive better informed.

The real danger isn’t AI Overviews themselves. It’s responding to them with fear rather than strategy.

Charlie frames it clearly: “I think if the response is fear and panic, that’s super unhelpful. That’s not gonna help anyone. What you actually need to respond with is maybe some excitement that things are changing and they’re interesting. And then a really solid plan based on research, based on your customer journeys.”

And AI Overviews aren’t the final form of Google’s AI integration into search. They’re more like a testing ground — a way to get users comfortable with AI as part of their search journey. Google’s long-term vision, based on what Sundar Pichai and the company have announced, points towards something much closer to AI Mode than traditional blue links.

“I think they’re more like a testing bed for getting searchers used to using AI and it becoming a normal part of the search journey,” Charlie explains. “Long term, their vision is actually gonna be that search is much closer to how AI Mode works and operates than the traditional blue links that we see now.”

The timeline for that transition remains unclear. But the direction of travel is not.

How Will Personal Intelligence Change Search Rankings

Buried in the earnings call was a concept that deserves far more attention from marketing teams: personal intelligence. Sundar Pichai described it as delivering responses that are “uniquely relevant” to each individual user.

On the surface, that sounds like a better user experience. But for marketers, it introduces a significant challenge. If two users searching the same query see different results, what does “ranking” even mean anymore?

Charlie flags several practical implications that marketing leaders need to be thinking about now:

Keyword rank trackers become less meaningful. If results are personalised, the position your rank tracker reports may not reflect what your actual customers are seeing. This doesn’t make keywords irrelevant — but it does mean the data is becoming less of an exact science and more of a directional signal.

Brand strength matters more than ever. When an AI system is deciding which brands to surface for a personalised query, it’s looking at authority signals, schema markup, and whether your website is recognised as a trusted source in your category. Generic, undifferentiated content is going to struggle in this environment.

Understanding your customer becomes non-negotiable. If search results are being tailored to individual users, your content strategy needs to be tailored too. That means deeply understanding the different segments within your audience, their search behaviours, and the touchpoints that matter to them.

Dale highlighted an emerging trend that illustrates just how dramatically AI is reshaping brand visibility. James Cadwallader from Profound recently shared an example from Claude where users were prompted to choose between just three brands in a product category — creating an entirely new ranking system with far fewer slots than the traditional ten organic positions.

“It’s created a brand new ranking system where you have to be one of those three brands that’s popping up,” Dale explains. “You are fighting for one of three positions instead of what we used to — four or five years ago — of you want to be in the top three of rankings, but you were one of ten initially.”

Whether this pattern becomes widespread across Google’s own products remains to be seen. But it signals a fundamental shift: from competing for one of ten positions on a page to competing for one of three recommendations from an AI system.

What Does Agentic Commerce Mean for eCommerce Brands

One of the most forward-looking parts of the conversation centred on agentic commerce — the idea that AI systems will increasingly complete transactions on behalf of users without those users ever visiting a brand’s website.

Dale shared a personal example that illustrates the consumer side of this shift perfectly. He used AI Mode to find the cheapest place to buy monkey nuts (for the family of squirrels in his garden, naturally). AI Mode found several options, identified the best price per kilo on eBay — and then Dale hit a wall. He couldn’t complete the purchase within the AI experience. He had to click through to eBay, log in, potentially create an account, and navigate the checkout process.

“I just wanted to click a button that would just complete that checkout for me and just buy it,” Dale says. “As a consumer, I couldn’t be bothered to complete that purchase, so I just didn’t do it.”

That friction exists today. But every signal from Google, from the AI chatbot providers, and from the broader tech industry suggests it won’t exist for much longer. Shopping agents, restaurant bookings, travel bookings — they’re all moving towards seamless, in-platform transactions.

For eCommerce brands, this creates a genuine strategic tension. Do you optimise to appear in these AI-driven shopping experiences — accepting that you may sacrifice some margin and lose the opportunity to upsell? Or do you focus on driving direct traffic to your website, where you control the experience and the relationship?

Charlie’s answer is characteristically pragmatic: it depends on your business, your margins, and your customers.

“I think you have to at some stage admit defeat to the fact that Google has dominance here and that there are industry giants,” she says. “Optimising to shop in the right places, running ads in the right places, integrating with agents — I think is all gonna become part of an eCommerce strategy over time.”

But it’s not all or nothing. Brands with strong customer loyalty — particularly in categories like beauty, skincare, and fashion where customers actively want to hear about new products — will continue to drive significant direct traffic and higher lifetime values. The challenge is greatest for transactional, commoditised purchases where the consumer’s primary motivation is convenience and price.

The smartest approach, both Charlie and Dale agree, is to treat agentic commerce as part of a broader ecosystem rather than an existential threat. If you’re seeing high transaction volume for a particular product line via AI-driven shopping, feed that intelligence back to your other teams. Use it to inform your on-site merchandising, your advertising strategy, and your customer acquisition efforts across every channel.

Where Should Marketing Leaders Invest Their Budgets

With so many channels, platforms, and emerging technologies competing for attention, one of the hardest questions for marketing leaders right now is simply: where should the money go?

Charlie’s framework is refreshingly simple: 80/20.

“It’s always 80% of your budget and your resource to make sure what’s performing really well for you continues to perform as best that it can,” she says. “And 20% on the experimental things that could be potentially growth areas for you — could be new channels, or are just something different.”

That 20% might include exploring AI Search Optimisation, testing agentic integrations, or building a presence on platforms where your competitors haven’t yet established themselves. The key is that it’s deliberate experimentation, not trend-chasing.

The biggest danger, Charlie warns, is investing heavily in something simply because it feels trendy without first confirming that your customers are actually there.

“Focus on where your customer actually is. And if you don’t know, find out before you start investing a significant amount of team time and marketing budget on something that might be a non-starter.”

That advice sounds obvious. But in a landscape where every week brings a new platform, a new AI feature, or a new “must-do” tactic, the discipline to stay focused on what’s actually working — while carving out a measured allocation for experimentation — is rarer than it should be.

What Did Google’s Earnings Call Leave Out

Earnings calls are, by their nature, a company’s best version of its own story. And Google’s Q1 results give it a very good story to tell. But there are several things the call didn’t address that marketing leaders should be paying attention to.

The impact on publishers and website owners. Google’s search growth doesn’t automatically mean healthy traffic for the websites appearing in those results. AI Overviews can satisfy user queries without generating a click, which is great for Google’s engagement metrics but potentially damaging for content creators and publishers who depend on that traffic.

The DOJ antitrust case. The ongoing Department of Justice antitrust case against Google could have significant implications for how search operates. Depending on the outcome, it could affect everything from default search engine agreements to how Google integrates its own products into search results. It’s worth monitoring.

Competitive pressure from AI chatbots. While Google chose not to dwell on its competitors, the reality is that ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity are all growing rapidly and capturing search-like intent. Gemini, despite significant improvements, remains something of an underdog in the AI chatbot race.

Charlie doesn’t pull punches on this point: “I would put Gemini in the underdog category. The marketing strategies from ChatGPT — from OpenAI — around making that a mass market consumer product means that it’s gonna be hard to get people back onto Gemini.”

She also highlights Anthropic’s Claude as an increasingly serious competitor, particularly as a workplace tool through its Cowork product. The AI chatbot landscape is more competitive than the earnings call suggests, and that competition could reshape search behaviour in ways that affect every brand’s strategy.

Next Steps

This week:

Audit your current organic and paid performance against the shifts described above. Are your organic clickthrough rates declining even as impressions hold steady? Is your paid spend increasing to compensate? If so, you need a more strategic response than simply spending more on ads.

Check whether your website is optimised for AI consumption. That means clear schema markup, well-structured headings, concise factual content, and strong FAQ sections. These are the signals that help AI systems — whether Google’s AI Overviews, AI Mode, or third-party chatbots — recognise your brand as an authority.

Next 30 days:

Revisit your keyword strategy through the lens of personal intelligence. If rank positions are becoming less reliable as a metric, shift your focus towards share of voice, branded search volume, and conversion data as more meaningful indicators of performance.

Map your customer journey to identify where AI touchpoints are influencing decisions. Are your prospects using ChatGPT or Perplexity to research solutions before they ever reach Google? If so, your SEO strategy needs to account for those pre-search interactions.

Next 90 days:

Develop a clear AI Search Optimisation strategy that sits alongside your existing SEO and paid media efforts. This should include a plan for how your brand appears in AI Overviews, AI Mode, and third-party AI chatbots — not as a replacement for traditional search, but as an integrated part of your overall approach.

If you’re in eCommerce, begin exploring how agentic commerce could affect your category. Identify which product lines are most vulnerable to in-platform purchasing and develop a strategy that balances direct traffic with visibility inside AI-driven shopping experiences.

If you’d like an expert assessment of how these changes are affecting your specific business, you can request a free marketing review from Exposure Ninja.

In Conclusion

Google’s earnings tell us two things simultaneously. First, that Google Search is not dying — it’s growing, evolving, and successfully monetising AI at an impressive scale. Second, that Google’s growth and your brand’s growth are increasingly separate conversations.

The brands that will win in this environment are not the ones throwing more budget at Google Ads out of fear, and they’re not the ones pretending nothing has changed. They’re the ones building strategies grounded in data, focused on where their customers actually are, and flexible enough to adapt as AI continues to reshape the search landscape.

As Charlie puts it: respond with curiosity and a solid plan — not fear and panic. The opportunities are real, but only for those willing to move.

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