Google expands AI Mode advertising beyond the US
Google is expanding advertising in its AI-powered Search experiences to international markets as Alphabet seeks new revenue opportunities from generative AI. The announcement was made during Alphabet’s third-quarter earnings call, where the company reported $127.6 billion in revenue, up 25% year over year.
The move comes as growth in Google Search advertising has slowed. Search revenue rose 12% year over year in the third quarter, compared with 17% in the second quarter and 19% in the first quarter. Alphabet shares fell 8% after the results.
AI Mode ads move into international markets
Philipp Schindler, Google’s chief business officer, said the company is scaling high-quality ads within AI Overviews in AI Mode to more users and queries. The international rollout marks the first global expansion of Google’s monetisation footprint for this format.
Google is also introducing multi-turn ads and AI Mode in the United States. The new placements build on the Gemini-powered advertising formats announced in May, including conversational discovery ads that respond to questions and sponsored recommendations incorporated into AI-generated answers.
Google said early performance is encouraging. Schindler said click-through rates for sponsored product listings in AI Mode are already comparable to those for organic listings, while user research indicates that people consider the ads relevant.
Longer and more multimodal search behaviour
Sundar Pichai said Search queries recorded their fastest year-over-year growth rate in five years, although he did not provide a precise figure. He attributed the change to AI features that encourage longer, more complex searches.
Queries in AI Mode are three times longer on average than traditional searches, Pichai said. One in five AI Mode searches globally uses voice, images or documents, and Google now processes more than 50 billion visual searches each month.
The advertising expansion arrives alongside substantial investment in Google’s wider AI infrastructure and services. The company’s cloud momentum is reflected in Google Cloud AI growth and capacity constraints as demand for AI capabilities drives growth while computing capacity remains a scaling constraint.
What the results mean for advertisers
Alphabet’s Google Services division, which includes Search, generated $96.3 billion in revenue, up 11% year over year. Google Cloud revenue rose 103% to $30.7 billion. During the quarter, Google also released Gemini 4 Argon, said the Gemini app had reached one billion monthly users, and launched its Pixel 11 line.
For businesses, the rollout makes AI Search a paid-discovery environment to monitor rather than a purely experimental interface. Advertisers should consider whether their product information, creative assets and measurement practices can address longer, conversational and multimodal queries before committing budget to the new formats.