GoKawiil
Tech News
In the quarter ending September 2026, Google Search generated $63.4 billion of Alphabet's $128 billion total revenue, or 49.7%. This marks the first time Search has fallen below 50% of revenue since Alphabet began breaking out the figure separately, down from a range of 52.8% to 62.0% over the prior 31 quarters.
Alphabet reported nearly $128 billion in Q3 2026 revenue and over $26 billion in net income, up 25% year-over-year but with earnings per share of $2.12, well below the $3.02 analysts expected. Chief Business Officer Philipp Schindler noted search volume grew 12% year-over-year, down from 17% in Q2 and 19% in Q1, with search revenue flat, while Google Cloud topped $30 billion, beating forecasts.
Alphabet's stock dropped more than 11 percent on Wednesday, erasing over $500 billion in market value, after the company reported that its AI Mode search feature generates less revenue than its traditional text-link search ads. Google's Q3 revenue rose 25 percent year-over-year to $127.6 billion, but search revenue growth slowed to 12 percent from 14.5 percent a year earlier, even as capital expenditures on AI more than doubled to $51.4 billion. Chief business officer Philipp Schindler attributed the softer search growth to 'lower monetization' in AI Mode, according to Search Engine Land.
Alphabet reported quarterly results in which Google search revenue came in below Wall Street expectations, raising concerns about competitive pressure from AI chatbots. The company also posted negative free cash flow for the period, and shares are on track for a significant post-earnings decline.
Security researcher John Tuckner of Socket documented 319 Chrome extensions, collectively installed 13.4 million times, that silently override users' default search engine and reroute queries through proxy servers before landing on Bing or Yahoo. This builds on his April 2025 finding of 57 such extensions with 6 million users, adding 264 newly identified ones covering another 8.7 million installs. The extensions masquerade as PDF converters, search tools, and similar utilities, and are unlisted on the Chrome Web Store, spreading instead through ads on other websites.
Alphabet stock fell more than 10% in premarket trading after the company posted its first simultaneous EPS and revenue miss since late 2022, driven by Search revenue falling short of forecasts for a second consecutive quarter. Google Cloud revenue more than doubled, with the CFO calling its TPU systems a 'meaningful contributor,' but that growth wasn't enough to offset investor worry over Search. Microsoft, by contrast, rose in premarket trading as Azure grew 48% to become its largest business, even as a lighter capex figure weighed on cloud-infrastructure stocks.
Alphabet reported search and other segment revenue grew 12% year-over-year to about $63 billion, missing analyst estimates for a second straight quarter even as the company said search query volume grew at its fastest pace in five years. Shares fell roughly 10% in after-hours trading after the company also posted negative free cash flow of $9 billion, triple what analysts expected. Executives attributed the revenue slowdown mainly to foreign exchange effects, which they said would weigh even more heavily next quarter.
Google is facing difficulty generating advertising revenue from its AI Mode search feature, according to a report. The shift toward conversational, AI-generated answers appears to be complicating the company's traditional ad-based business model.
Google is rolling out sponsored listings in AI Mode search results to India, Australia, Canada, Kenya, Malaysia, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines and Singapore, with Brazil, Mexico and the UK slated to follow later in Q4 2026. The company says ads will carry a 'Sponsored' label to separate them from AI-generated answers, and in the US it is also testing ads that appear during follow-up questions within the same AI Mode conversation.
Alphabet's shares dropped more than 10% in after-hours trading after earnings of $2.12 per share missed estimates of $3.01, even as quarterly revenue rose 25% to $127.6 billion. Executives said Google's AI Search mode generates less ad revenue per query than classic search, and capital expenditure more than doubled year over year to $51.4 billion, pushing free cash flow negative.
A user running a security audit with Claude Code discovered that a hidden directory on their iPhone, PhotoData/Thumbnails, contained over 146,000 photos and videos they had deleted between 2021 and 2025, including some cleared multiple times from Recently Deleted. The files included sensitive images such as ID photos, bank screenshots and a crypto seed phrase, and were accessible to any of the 23 apps on the phone with file and folder permissions.
Google announced during Alphabet's Q3 earnings call that it is rolling out ads within AI Overviews and AI Mode to international markets, alongside new multi-turn ad formats in the U.S. Alphabet reported $127.6 billion in revenue, up 25% year over year, but Search ad growth slowed to 12% from 17% in Q2 and 19% in Q1, and Alphabet shares fell 8% after the results. Chief business officer Philipp Schindler said click-through rates on sponsored listings in AI Mode now match those of organic listings.