Google is extending advertising in its AI-powered Search experiences to international markets, looking to build a new revenue stream as growth in its established Search ad business cools. The announcement puts the company’s AI features at the center of its efforts to keep advertising relevant as people search in new ways.
Slower growth raises the stakes
Alphabet reported $127.6 billion in revenue for the third quarter, up 25% year over year. Search advertising growth, however, continued to ease, while Alphabet shares fell 8% following the results.
Google Search revenue grew 12% year over year in the third quarter, compared with 17% in the second quarter and 19% in the first. That trend gives Google a reason to test whether ads within AI-powered answers can contribute meaningfully to its advertising business.
The wider Google Services division, which includes Search, brought in $96.3 billion in revenue, up 11% year over year. Google Cloud revenue rose 103% to $30.7 billion, showing that the quarter’s results included sharply different growth rates across the company’s businesses.
AI Mode ads move beyond the U.S.
Google said it is scaling ads in AI Overviews and AI Mode to more users and queries. Philipp Schindler, Google’s chief business officer, said the company is taking its monetization footprint global for the first time, alongside multi-turn ads and AI Mode in the U.S.
AI Mode ads are designed to appear in a search experience built around generated answers and ongoing conversations. The international expansion follows Google’s May announcement of Gemini-powered advertising formats, including conversational discovery ads that respond to questions and sponsored recommendations within AI-generated answers.
These formats give Google more opportunities to connect advertising with what a person is exploring. Their performance will matter as the company broadens access: the expansion tests whether ads that fit into AI-assisted searches can work across more markets and query types.
Google points to early ad performance
Schindler said click-through rates for sponsored product listings in AI Mode are already comparable to those for organic listings. Google’s user research also indicates that people find the ads relevant.
Those early signals address two questions for advertisers: whether people notice sponsored placements in AI Mode and whether the placements relate to their searches. The company has shared those comparisons and research findings, but the announcement does not provide a detailed breakdown by market or ad format.
Google’s approach also reflects a shift in how it describes Search. CEO Sundar Pichai said Search queries grew at their fastest year-over-year rate in five years, without giving an exact growth rate. He credited AI features with changing how people use the product, including by encouraging longer and more complex queries.
Search behavior is changing with AI
Queries in AI Mode are three times longer on average than traditional searches, Pichai said. One in five AI Mode searches globally involves voice, images, or documents, and Google has passed 50 billion visual searches per month.
These figures describe search activity that goes beyond a short typed phrase. People can bring different kinds of input to Search, while AI features can support more detailed questions and follow-up exploration. For Google, that creates new settings in which it can place ads, while the ad experience must remain relevant to what people are trying to do.
The international rollout therefore links two parts of Google’s strategy: expanding AI-assisted Search and finding ways to monetize it. The company’s next challenge is to make those formats useful to users and effective for advertisers as they reach more people and queries.