Google says AI Mode queries arrive earlier and earn less, as paid search shifts up the funnel
Google's Shivani Mohan, vice president of data science and user experience research for Search, told advertisers on 28 October that people are now bringing much longer, more detailed questions to Google, including types of query they would never previously have thought to ask. She described the change as an expansionary moment for search, with queries moving up the funnel towards brainstorming and category-level questions rather than purchase intent.
On the same day, Alphabet chief business officer Philipp Schindler told analysts that strong growth in AI Mode queries had an impact on revenue because of the lower monetisation Google sees in AI Mode. Search and other revenue came in at $63.35 billion in Q3 2026, up 12% year on year, down from 19% in Q1 and 17% in Q2. Paid clicks rose 8% year on year, against 13% in each of the first two quarters, while cost per click rose 4%.
Google is scaling ads in AI Overviews and AI Mode to more users and queries, and is expanding AI Mode ads internationally. Multi-turn ads are launching in the US so that ads can appear in follow-up queries. The only performance figure Google has published is that click-through rates are already similar between sponsored and organic product list items within AI Mode, based on two weeks of internal data from August and September 2026.
For brands chasing citations in AI answers, the shift means the questions that matter are increasingly asked well before a purchase, and the accounts measuring them are still built around the bottom of the funnel. Google has not broken out paid clicks or cost per click for AI Mode, so advertisers have no published benchmark for what those placements return.
Reported by Search Engine Journal ↗
Topics: AI Mode, AI advertising, Google Search