Google announces record number of Search queries and 19% revenue growth

Google announced that in the first quarter of 2026, the number of Search queries reached an all-time high. The company directly links this to AI features within search and simultaneously demonstrates that new scenarios are already supporting growth in its key advertising business.

What the Alphabet Report Shows

Alphabet published results for the quarter ending March 31, 2026 on April 29. Total revenue grew 22% year-over-year and reached $109.9 billion.

Google Services revenue increased 16% to $89.6 billion, while Google Search & other revenue grew 19% to $60.4 billion.

Here's why this matters: amid discussions that chatbots could cannibalize search traffic, Google shows the opposite picture — search has not declined but updated its all-time high in query volume. Alphabet's net income jumped 81% to $62.6 billion, and earnings per share rose to $5.

11. There's a nuance here though: the report separately noted that other income brought in $37.7 billion, primarily from unrealized gains on investments.

In other words, the core business also grew strongly, but the profit headline should be read carefully and not attributed solely to the effect of search and Gemini.

How AI Is Changing Search

The main statement in the release is that the AI experience within Search no longer looks like an experiment. According to Sundar Pichai, it's precisely the AI features that are driving service usage upward. For Google, this is a crucial signal: the company is trying to prove to the market that generative AI doesn't destroy its core product but expands the scenarios in which users turn to search at all.

"Search had a strong quarter: AI features drove usage, and query

volume reached an all-time high."

Essentially, Google is not building a separate AI service alongside search, but rather a new interface on top of already existing distribution. The user gets classic Search, AI-powered answers, more complex queries, and can then move to other products in the ecosystem. For the business, this is more profitable than losing traffic to external chatbots: the longer a user stays within Google, the more monetization points the company preserves.

Where Else Is Growth Coming From

The results show that Google's bet goes beyond Search alone. The AI wave is already pulling several directions at once. From the previous quarter the company reported 325 million paid subscriptions, so the new figure represents a notable step up in just three months.

• Paid subscriptions grew to 350 million, with YouTube and Google One named as the main drivers.
• Google Cloud revenue jumped 63% to $20.0 billion.
• The cloud business backlog nearly doubled quarter-over-quarter and exceeded $460 billion.
• Paid monthly active users of Gemini Enterprise grew 40% quarter-over-quarter.
• Gemini models now process more than 16 billion tokens per minute through direct API usage by customers.

Against this backdrop, it's particularly notable that Google is trying to monetize AI on three levels simultaneously: through advertising in Search, through consumer subscriptions, and through enterprise cloud. Even Waymo is used in the release as part of the broader story of technological momentum: the company separately emphasized that the service exceeded 500,000 fully autonomous rides per week.

What It Means

The main conclusion for the market is straightforward: so far, generative AI isn't breaking Google's search model but appears to be expanding it. The company didn't disclose the absolute number of queries, so the scale of the record can't be verified, but Search revenue growth of 19% makes Pichai's statement significant. If Google maintains this balance between AI-powered answers, advertising, and subscriptions, Search will remain not a victim of the AI era, but its main distribution hub.