Google’s Q1 2026 earnings gave us a sharper look at AI search

“This is going to kill Google.”

Such went many a prognostication when AI-assisted search began to emerge with the rocketlike ascents of companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. Traditional search would fall to the wayside in favor of these next-generation upstarts, the narrative went, and a company of Google’s size would have too many legacy systems to wrangle in order to innovate in a way that would allow it to keep up.

But it turned out things weren’t so simple: Google is alive. Very much alive. And there are lots of implications for brand marketers, and the digital journeys that we are tasked with following and shaping.

You can get a closer look at this in its parent company Alphabet’s Q1 2026 earnings, which were reported on April 29. Alphabet posted $109.9 billion in Q1 2026 revenue, up 22% year-over-year. That’s its highest quarterly growth rate since 2022 – since before ChatGPT launched.

The headline that matters most for brands is that Google Search revenue hit $60.4 billion, up 19% year-over-year. CEO Sundar Pichai directly attributed this to AI Overviews and AI Mode, saying people are “coming back to Search more” and that queries are at an all-time high. Google’s ability to innovate alongside its AI-native competitors has kept it more than relevant.

Here’s what else is important.

1. Google isn’t falling behind. It’s transforming the road.

The assumption held by many was that ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other LLMs were eating Google’s lunch. Q1 says otherwise. AI isn’t killing Google Search yet. If anything, Alphabet’s Q1 suggests Google is successfully pulling AI search behavior back into its own ecosystem. Google is absorbing AI behavior into its own ecosystem via AI Overviews and AI Mode, rather than ceding ground to competitors. Brands need to understand that Google itself has figuratively changed lanes. To keep up with this metaphor, while the street you’re turning onto may still be called Google, it looks completely different.

2. The journey is getting longer inside Google, not shorter.

The counterintuitive insight here is that AI Overviews are driving more queries, not fewer. Pichai said users are using Google conversationally now, asking follow-up questions and going deeper, with queries at an all-time high. That’s a longer engagement loop. Brands appear or disappear at each step of it based on content quality and structure, not just keyword rankings.

Think of it this way: Every additional query inside an AI-native Google is another moment that your content either appears with the right framing, or it doesn't. This is why rank and visibility are no longer enough; brands need to understand how they are framed, cited, omitted, and compared across AI-generated journeys.

This also underscores the importance of understanding “Trojan Horse traffic,” as we call it at Knotch. Google’s AI Overviews often give audiences what they are initially looking for without requiring them to click, meaning that their journey isn’t trackable by traditional metrics. Being ready for indirect LLM visitors is key for today’s marketers; audiences are getting the initial answers they need without a click, and are hence more likely to actually come to your site further along in their journeys and in search of validation, verification, and trust.

3. Generative Engine Optimization just got more urgent, not less.

“Google’s not dead” might cause some marketers to breathe a sigh of relief. Does this mean that their familiar playbook still holds, and that they don’t have to learn a whole new set of optimization tactics? (SEO can be arcane enough on its own, after all.)

That’s not the case. In fact, Google’s growth accelerates the GEO imperative for brands. Gemini models are now processing more than 16 billion tokens per minute via direct API use, up 60% from the previous quarter. More tokens processed means more AI-mediated answers delivered, and brands that aren’t structuring content for AI citation are losing ground inside the very platform that’s growing fastest.

But visibility isn’t the whole picture, and being ready for this requires prioritizing more than GEO – SEO remains extremely relevant (especially when it comes to all things Google), as does closely monitoring and analyzing website journeys. And the window is shrinking quickly to build this intelligence infrastructure before it becomes a baseline expectation for brands. Today, most brands excel at measuring visibility but lack insight into what happens afterward. Companies that move now can create a compounding advantage through stronger optimization, more compelling ROI narratives, and more efficient conversion from the growing wave of high-intent, AI-influenced audiences.

Google has deftly made the jump to an AI-native company, something that many naysayers thought it couldn’t do. But that means brands that prepared for a post-Google world may have been solving the wrong problem. The right problem is to figure out how your content performs inside an AI-first Google – across AI Mode, AI Overviews, and Gemini Enterprise – simultaneously with how it performs inside ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. That is exactly the measurement and intelligence gap that platforms like Knotch are built to close.

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Published on May 8, 2026

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