On October 28, Google told Wall Street something that publishers, small businesses and anyone who’s ever depended on search traffic have been telling Google for two years.

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Of course, Google didn’t say it quite that way. What Philipp Schindler, Google’s chief business officer, did say on their Q3 2026 earnings call was that “the strong growth in AI Mode queries had an impact [on Search growth] because of the lower monetization we were seeing in AI Mode.”

In plain English, people still like asking Google’s AI questions. But Google is finding out that it doesn’t make as much money as easily from those answers as it does from a page of blue links and sponsored ads.

If this storyline sounds familiar, it should. It’s the same one that Google first handed to a lot of other businesses that relied on Google to push search traffic to their own sites about two years ago.

In an odd, perhaps even ironic sort of way, Google now knows what all that feels like.

Google reported on that call that search revenue grew 12% from a year ago to $63.4 billion. Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, said that people are searching more than ever; saying that query growth was “the highest it’s been in the last five years.”

Next comes the “but,” and the part of the story that got the headlines, tanked its stock and dented its market cap to the tune of nearly $500 billion in a single day .

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