Alphabet reported its third quarter on October 28, and the Search numbers point in two directions. Sundar Pichai said Google Search queries grew at their fastest year-over-year rate in five years, and he credited AI for it, commercial queries included. In the same report, Search and other revenue grew 12% to $63.35 billion.
That is a slowdown. Coverage of the call puts Search growth in the 17 to 19% range for the quarters before this one. So people ask Google more questions than ever, and each question earns Google a little less than it used to.
What Google said about AI search
Coverage of the call reports that AI Mode, the chat-style search tab, has passed one billion monthly users. AI Overviews, the summary at the top of an ordinary results page, passed 2.5 billion monthly users earlier this year. The Gemini app also reached one billion users, which Pichai called "the fastest-growing product in Google's history."
The reports also describe a change in how people search. Queries are longer and run over several turns, not two or three keywords typed once. And the users of the AI features show more commercial intent, which means more of these questions are about what to buy.
More questions, less money per question
Put the two halves together and the likely reading is simple. A buyer who asks AI Mode "which payroll tool works for a 30-person startup in three states" gets a full answer with a short list in it. They read the list, ask a follow-up, and maybe click one source. Under the old results page, the same research took five searches and a dozen clicks, and each of those searches had ad slots on it.
Google did not say this. It gave no query growth percentage, no AI Mode click-through figure and no split of revenue between AI Mode and classic results. The user counts are Google's own and nobody has checked them. But query growth at a five-year high next to revenue growth that fell by about a third is hard to explain any other way: more of the work now happens inside the answer.
Why commercial queries are the line to watch
Most AI search news is about traffic to publishers. The phrase "including commercial queries" matters more to a B2B company. It says the questions that used to send a buyer to your pricing page, your comparison page or a review site are now growing fastest inside an AI answer.
That changes what "ranking" means for those questions. In an AI Mode answer there is no position six. A vendor is either named in the short list or it is absent, and the buyer who asks a follow-up asks it about the names already on screen.
What to do with this
If your pipeline depends on people finding you through Google, the useful test this week is not your rank for a keyword. Type five of your buyers' real questions into AI Mode and into ChatGPT, and write down who gets named. Then look at which pages the answers cite. Those pages, and not your homepage, are what decide whether you make the list.
Do not over-read one quarter, though. A 12% rise is still growth, and Search ads still make Google more money than anything else it sells. The classic results page is not going away this year. What moved is the share of buying research that finishes before anyone clicks.
The bigger picture
Google now has two search products running side by side, and the newer one is where query growth comes from. For a startup, the change is that the buyer's shortlist is often written by the engine before the buyer visits a single vendor site. Being named in that answer is the new first page.
ClawWorld runs AI visibility work for B2B startups. Start with a free baseline report: 10 buyer questions, who ChatGPT and Claude name instead of you, and the pages they cite.